John
Oram sent me a link to a
bit Charlie wrote at Mike's inquirer showing an LGA Pentium 4
that had welded itself to the motherboard contacts. Charlie suggested
that the catastrophe was due to a thermal throttling failure.

However, I think this P4 disaster doesn't have anything to do
with thermal monitoring. The burn patterns do not originate from the die,
but from the contacts. If the die produced the heat necessary to melt
the metals in the pads/contacts as shown in the photo, then all the inner
contacts would have been destroyed first and the package would almost
certainly be scorched from the inside out. Also, the package itself
has residue primarily along its edges and none under the the die itself.

That wrecked CPU was almost certainly destroyed by water leaking into the
LGA socket and shorting out contacts and triggering electrolysis.
Considering that the water cooler failed prior to the problem, this
explanation makes the most sense.

An
article that I wrote about the VIA C7-M processor has been published today
at VIA Arena. VIA's
itty-bitty, 90nm IBM SOI x86 CPU holds a lot of promise for notebooks,
Microsoft Origami, handheld PCs, thin clients, blade servers, network
attached storage and other applications where low heat and ultra low power
draw are important.

The odds
are favorable that the former Serbian president was assassinated. His
lawyer claims that Mr. Milosevic's death might be due to poisoning.
However, the UN is
refusing to permit a medical team selected by Mr. Tomanovic, Mr.
Milosevic's lawyer, to examine the body. Despite the pointed conflict
of interest, the UN is only allowing its own team to perform an autopsy on
Mr. Milosevic. While government minions across the world chant the
mantra, "nothing to hide, nothing to fear," as they roll out a global
surveillance state, the UN leadership demonstrates it has no intention of
applying such notions on itself.

So was
Slobodan Milosevic guilty for crimes against humanity? When a man is
constantly attacked in the mainstream media, as this posthumous
article further demonstrates (while trying to make death by natural
causes seem plausible), the truth is probably far from what we have been
told.

With his
death, the UN International Criminal Tribunal charged with determining his
guilt will prematurely disband near the end of lengthy proceedings that have
dragged on for over four years. Despite UN prosecutor's claims to the
contrary, some court reports indicate that Mr. Milosevic often humiliated
his UN adversaries. Mr. Milosevic had
subpoenaed
President Clinton to appear as a witness, which, if successful, would have
forced the former U.S. President to testify at the Tribunal before the
defense rested its case this coming summer.

We have
made an offer on a house and can now be more aggressive about selling our
3288 sq. ft. (quoted from plans) home in Round Rock, Texas, the
eighth safest
city in the U.S. according to Morgan Quitno Press, an independent
research firm quoted by CNN and
other media
outlets.

Our loan is assumable, so the total cost to the buyer for our
four-year-old home should be well under $158,000. Please visit the
link above for more information.

What Gives With Google?

For many
years a Google search for "Van Smith" would logically yield Van's
Hardware Journal as the number one hit. Although we have not been
very active in recent years, we at one time had a quarter-million unique
visitors each month and we still have a PR6 ranking. Very recently, a
friend indirectly brought to my attention that our site was still landing at
the top of Google searches for my name.

But no
more.

Although
Yahoo searches still return this site at the top of a "Van Smith"
search, starting in the last couple of weeks or so Google suddenly doesn't
list our site at all on the first search page. Instead, very obscure
links appear at the top of the list including a strange pro-Iraq War hit at
number 2.

At the
time that I made the original Google discovery a little over a week ago, MSN
still returned our site at the top of its searches. However, now it
does not. In fact, our site does not show up until the fifth
search page with even secondary links from the OSMark forums appearing ahead
of VHJ! Such a reordering is plainly illogical.

So in
the course of a couple of weeks, our website has suddenly gone from the
number one hit when conducting a directly relevant search to becoming deeply
buried by two major search engines.

Google
has recently come under scrutiny for agreeing to censor searches in China.
This practice has escalated with the search giant
banning a mainstream news website from its worldwide search engines.

And to
hell with the 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of
America. The Constitution is "just a #$#$ #$&%# piece of paper!"
our leaders appear to believe. Mainstream Propaganda
Media declares the Constitution a "living document" and that strict
interpretations are antiquated.

Of
course, we all have known since the "Patriot Act" that Big Brother
Uncle Sam considers all of our email to be his property. Although the
decree also violates the 4th Amendment, the Patriot Act allows, though color
of law, Homeland Security to read any and all email sent by anyone to
anybody.

I've
wanted to write a "one-time pad" email program for a long time, but have not
been able to get around to it. The relentless march of our government
towards tyranny renews that impulse regularly.

"One-time
pad" (OTP) encryption is unbreakable if a source of truly random numbers
is available. Up until recently, a good source of "entropy"
(randomness) was not widely available for personal computing applications.
Now, however, VIA's C3 and C7 processors include hardware-based entropy
engines that are virtually fire hoses of random bits. What's extra
nice is that this entropy geyser is very easy to tap.

While
there are a few programs that claim to use OTP, unless the key is truly
random -- and the only way to reliably achieve this for large bitstreams is
through hardware-based RNGs (random number generators) -- the ciphertext is
potentially breakable.

If you
know of any VIA-optimized OTP email programs, please
let me know.

A well
defined number "2" appeared briefly in the eye of Hurricane Wilma as the
storm made landfall on the south Florida coast last fall. The Doppler
echo structure is so nearly perfect that it is hard to imagine the "2" was a
result of a natural phenomena. Can anyone identify the font?

Slowly
ramping up... Hell will become a ski resort before this computer
enthusiast "gets chipped."

Eisenhower, the late U.S. President who warned the American
People about dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex, is reported to have
said, "History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the
timid." Ike should have added "or the stupid" to that list.

And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death;
and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.

-- Rev 13:3

December 25th,
2005

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

December 8th,
2005

Without God There is No Freedom

This is
a note that I sent to a friend who frequently wears t-shirts bearing blatant
Satanic slogans and who goes by Satanic monikers in some Internet
communications.

Why
don't you get "666" tattooed on your forehead and be done with it? :)

Actually, the Mark of the Beast will be a microchip/device that you will
be forced to have integrated onto/into your body that will allow the Beast
to track and control everything that you buy or sell. The chip will
enable the Beast to monitor when you logon to your computer or to take
this "privilege" away at his whim. The Beast will know what you are
viewing on the Internet and what you say to you girlfriend in your email.
Your chip will have to be scanned when you travel, when you check out a
book at the library, when you go to the doctor and as you walk down the
street. You might very well even be monitored scrupulously enough so that
the Beast will know when you enter or leave your house or when you get up
in the morning and go to bed at night. Nothing will escape his Eye, or at
least that is in his plan known as the "Beast System."

Even in my most depraved, incoherent states, I can't imagine this sounding
cool to anyone except our Overlords. Our politicians, both Democrat and
Republican alike, seem to be hell-bent on establishing the type of
ubiquitous surveillance state required by the Beast. Bush, through
the Patriot Acts and various Homeland Security initiatives, is rolling out
huge portions of the Beast System, so true Satanists worship Bush. All
others devil worshipers are simply pretenders. Of course, I write
that somewhat tongue-in-cheek knowing your antipathy for the current
President, but there is literal truth in those statements...

The Beast seeks to abolish Free Will. Christ brought to mankind a
message that enabled true Free Will, the type of self determination that
led to the birth of our nation. Free Will requires Truth. Free Will
requires God. Destroy one, you destroy them all.

Without God, without Truth, you are left with the rule of man which
inevitably leads to enslavement.

Without God there is no Freedom.

Christ knew what he was talking about, friend. Christ was the Son of God.

And, yes, I am happy to report that it looks like VIA will be
using OpenSourceMark as a primary benchmark for promoting their new C7
processor.

The SourceForge site has been very unstable over the last
week, so downloading the new release might require patience.
SourceForge has gotten a major facelift in the last couple of weeks, so that
might be the cause of the recent site issues.

I know
that we haven't been posting much lately, but follow the link above to see
one reason why we have been busy. You can also get a sneak peek at VIA
C7 performance numbers.

August 4th,
2005

Nils Dahl: Nukes, Centaur and Kexi

This
item is
amusing only because it says, in part, exactly what I said some years ago -
about Al Quaida making lots of its money from opium production in
Afghanistan, among other things. You might like to read a 'real
professional intelligence expert's words' on the same thing. After all,
what the heck do I know? Love all those Opteron supercomputers too.

And just
fyi, I expect to buy a Centaur system late this year. The motherboard will
have to have Firewire and usb 2.0 - ideally - or I can get a card for
Firewire. Well, hopefully this year. Should be fast enough to run the next
build of Suse Linux. Sometime soon, a database front end called Kexi will
reach version 1.0 as a standalone app running under KDE - and that is what I
want. The Kexi version integrated into KOffice will come a bit later, as
usual.

Oh, Kexi
is supposed to be a clone of ACCESS that is somewhat easier to use.

I have
updated my system. I just got Opera 8.01 for the old pentium 166 computer.
Works a lot faster and better than IE 5 does.

-- nils dahl

Nils
wrote the note above in mid-July. A foreboding postscript to it is a
follow-up
article suggesting a possible nuke attack this weekend.

I
snapped a few fireworks photographs at CJ's Fourth of July party and sent
one of the pictures to Steve's Digicams, a popular digital camera
review site. The picture won
Photo of the Day
for July
14th. The unretouched, full-sized version of the 8-megapixel
photograph can be found here.

I took
the picture with a Minolta Dimage A200, an 8-megapixel fixed-lens digital
camera. The Minolta A200 is one of the best all-around "all-in-one
digicams" (versus digital SLRs) available today. Other noteworthy
fixed-lens digital cameras are the Panasonic FZ20 and FZ5, and the Fuji
FinePix F10.

A camera
that could have been at the top of my list is the Canon PowerShot S2 IS,
which, unfortunately, is hindered by excessive image noise. Another
camera that falls just short of the top is the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H1 which
is brought down by a relatively mediocre lens, reliance upon Sony's
proprietary Memory Shtick Pro and excessive in-camera processing.

Marius
sends us a link to what appears to be a promising benchmark for measuring
GTK+ 2d user interface performance. This
Debian-based benchmark should also be helpful for testing Linux-based
thin clients. A few of GtkPerf's tests might be useful for porting to
COSBI, especially the Linux version of OSMark. The original link to
Marius' news item is
here.

Here is
the full source code for OpenSourceMark v1 Beta 7a and all of the other
COSBI programs. I've got the OpenGL tests in this snapshot which I
accidentally left out of Beta 6. The zipped file is about 30MB.

To build
the executables you will need to install the following freely available
libraries:

The
latest version of OSMark was compiled in Delphi 2005, but the program should
also compile in Delphi 7 if you comment out the "Priority" method call for
the thread classes.

If you
just want to run the latest version of OpenSourceMark and don't need the
source code, you can get it here.
You can read much more about Beta 7a in the May 27th and May 31st news bytes
below.

If you want even more information about COSBI, please visit COSBI's
forums.

C7-M Mobile Processor: Give it to the Ole' Guard

John
Oram wants to get VIA's head honchos riled up. He writes:

Today I was at a California city's police department. We are going to
upgrade their desktop position computers and operating system for the
Orbacom TDM-150
circa 1984 8086-class CPU proprietary radio control system.

So the "consultant" asks about using small footprint desktop computer. I
said no problem. Only caveat I recommended is to add 2GB of system RAM
whether they use W2k or XP with the proprietary software - which you could
use with a 500MB hard drive and have plenty of room for temp files.
Consultant and IT manager say "City has site license for XP" & I said go
for it. Then the consultant tells me he is going to use a 2+GHz Intel P4
in the smallest Dell box. I said okay but it will get way hotter than
other options now available like VIA C7-M.

Immediately he starts on a tear about non-Intel CPU's being incompatible
with everything. So I stopped him and asked him the last time he tried a
non-Intel CPU? He finally admitted he hadn't tried anything non-Intel in
over ten years. I laughed at him and asked him how old his home
refrigerator was? I changed the subject 'cause I could see he was not
happy with me pushing him on his expertise in front of the head IT person
for the city.

I am a part of the SurvPC discussion list. Where lots of ole' hardware
buffs talk about making early iron work with later software (Linux & MS
being primary). I get that same line of pigheaded nonsense from the list
members who bought a 80286-8MHz or 80386-16MHz and had a minor issue. But
really their "knowledge?" about a possible problem comes from an article
they remember they read from some techy publication in that era.

Same sort of media fixation on a potential error like Intel had with the
math calculations on one of their early 1990's CPU. By the way I never met
anybody in state govt with big databases or engineering calculation
software that had a replicate-able issue.

FUD is the life blood of the tech journals, bloggers, and is picked
up as gospel by the pseudo-techy gatekeepers...

Maybe if we rile up Via's bosses, somebody could wake up to how the real
world views non-Intel. Tell those high-paid not-invented-here folks to
seed a few of their prize new toys into the hands of the really old
journalist - the folks who were pecking at keyboards in the early 1980's.
I can give ya names, but I'm sure you probably know 'em as well or better
than me.

I go through this same daily waltz around the Maypole with the seven
companies we rep for CA & NV.

The two of us at
www.apogee.us can say "what ever" 'til we turn green in the face. Then
have a prospect at a trade show or especially an existing customer, say
the same blinkin' thing; Gabriel's Trumpets Blow, Spotlight in the sky
come on, and, everybody in management goes "obviously them folks is
brillant" - and skip over the fact we have said "what ever" for five years
running at the top of our lungs :-(

Now whether anybody actually gets off their high-paid lazy backsides and
DOES something; anything; or, even appear to think about a game plan to
accomplish the ideas - that's a whole different kettle of fishes <BG>

As you can tell I get paid commission and do NOT like to lose any deals!

Bill O'Brien
used the latest version of OpenSourceMark as his lead-off benchmark in his
review of the CyberPower Ultra Workstation 3000. See yesterday's news
item for more about Bill. You can download Beta 7a in that same news
byte.

Perhaps even more impressive however is the unique Twin Turbo design which
changes the power consumption and clock speed of the CPU on the fly
according to the required CPU utilization. CJ Holthaus, Director of System
Validation at Centaur Technology demonstrated this technology on a 1.5GHz
system. When the system was idle the speed sat just under 600MHz. When he
opened a CPU intensive program it shot up to the full 1.5GHz. But most
alluring of all, when he opened an MPEG2 movie the MHz remained at 599.82MHz
whilst still producing perfectly smooth playback. A member of the audience
also bravely put his finger on the processor after the heat sink and fan had
been removed. It was not hot to touch and CJ revealed that they were
actually not needed. The C7-M is manufactured using the 90nm
system-on-insulator (SOI) process to produce the tiny 30mm2 processor die
which only requires minimal cooling.

Memorial Day

John
Oram writes us:

I
was in the US Army as a chopper crew-chief during the Vietnam Era. I
watched grammar school friends go overseas to never return. I left the
Army Reserves because I opposed how politicians rhetoric used "freedom" to
defend their imperialistic facts.

The present Bush Inc administration has at its core the same people who
were the political fools in charge during the Vietnam Era. Slowly, ever so
slowly, facts are creeping out from under flat rocks that expose the out
right lies of the petrochemical barons and their hired political henchmen.

The only light I see at the end of the present political tunnel is even
some of my friends who were staunchest supporters of Bush Inc - no matter
what absurd excuse he offered to justify his weird world views - say GWB
has crossed over and sold his soul to the televangelism fringe bigots like
Pat Roberts and Tom Dulay. Always remember no one is more self-righteous
than a reformed; no matter what they are reforming from...

Felt and Colson

In an
email to us today, James Blasius pens:

I
am surprised that Chuck Colson, former Nixon staffer caught up in the
Watergate scandal and now prison minister, is upset that Mark Felt, deputy
director of the FBI, helped root out Nixon's wrongdoings. ""When any
president has to worry whether the deputy director of the FBI is sneaking
around in dark corridors peddling information in the middle of the night,
he's in trouble" he says.

I am disappointed in Colson. As the Bible says, a man can have only one
master. In Colson's case, the choice is (or was) for Nixon or for the
truth. If a Christian chooses another master than the truth, he is in
serious danger.

"For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to
the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But whoever does what is true
comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have
been carried out in God." (John 3:20-21)

James
ends with a quote from Ephesians 5:11: "Have nothing to do with the
fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them."

This new
beta version of OpenSourceMark corrects issues encountered with certain AMD
CPUs when running the Mandelbrot test. Specifically, I have reduced
the thread count from 32 down to twice the number of logical processors in
the system.

Many
thanks to Bill O'Brien for invaluable help on the strange, enigmatic and
frustrating Mandelbrot headache. In addition to running his own
fascinating website, Bill writes for
PC Magazine
and CMP.
Back during benchmarking's more honest days, Mr. O'Brien crafted the
original tests for PC Labs, the benchmark development shop for PC Magazine.
This means that Bill holds a place in the tiny pantheon of benchmarking
demigods.

Scores from Beta 7a are comparable with scores from Beta 7
except for the mobile tests where the baseline system is now a Dell Inspiron
600M equipped with a 1.5GHz Pentium-M (Banias) and a 52.2 Watt-Hour battery.
The new mobile baseline reference system was necessary because the previous
baseline, a 1.6GHz efficeon, had performance scores so low that the
performance scores for all other systems became very large when normalized
against the efficeon. Therefore, with the efficeon serving as the
reference system, performance was overwhelming the battery life component of
the overall score for almost all other systems. The Banias-based Dell
notebook is a much more balanced and relevant baseline, especially since the
Transmeta efficeon is essentially defunct.

Bill
reported a failure that he encountered in Beta 7 during the Mandelbrot test.
We have duplicated this failure only on nForce2-based motherboards, but no
other north bridges have failed so far. We have successfully tested
Beta 7 on north bridges from Intel, VIA, AMD and Transmeta.

Bill
also let us know of a bug in the Result Viewer with Intel chips having L3
caches. The simplest workaround is to run OSMark from a batch file.
This will dump results into a file and exit the program when finished.

If you find more bugs, please post them at COSBI's
forums. You can
download COSBI OpenSourceMark Beta 7 here.

I've
updated OpenSourceMark quite a bit since beta 6. Here is a list of
changes in the new version (which can be downloaded from the main link
above):

The
benchmark is now compiled in Delphi 2005 Update 3. This is the first
released build done in Delphi 2005.

OSMark
now uses the most recent GLScene and Graphics32 libraries. The
failures seen in Beta 6 when using the newest ATi Catalyst drivers are now
fixed.

The
following tests are newly threaded for Beta 7: BandwidthBP64 (memory
bandwidth test using block prefetching along 64-byte strides), MemLatency
(a memory latency test conducted across two 16MB integer arrays where
random elements are copied from the source array to random destinations in
the target array) and Encrypt/Decrypt (an AES encryption/decryption test
using Gladman code).

There
are now three new tests, all of which are threaded and all of which were
recommended by Kalumba: PNGOut (a popular utility for generating PNG image
files), 7zip (a very popular archiving tool that provides extremely high
compression levels) and Upx (a utility for compressing executables that
are automatically decompressed at runtime).

The
Encrypt/Decrypt test is now normalized against a 1.33GHz VIA C3, which
means that the VIA chip will get about 1,000 on this test. While the
rest of the tests remain normalized against a 3.4GHz HyperThreading
Pentium 4-Northwood system, I set the AES test apart because the C3 is so
much faster than the P4 at encryption/decryption that the overall score
for VIA's processors were being skewed upwards by a large amount.
Consequently, the 3.4GHz P4 reference system now has an overall score that
is slightly lower than 1,000 since its Encrypt/Decrypt score is now a puny
16. You will find scores for the reference system in the Result
Viewer.

The
Mobile Tests are now functional. There are two mobile tests.
The "normal" test, which is run if "Max Power Draw" is unchecked,
generates a performance score and then spawns an individual test, sleeps a
minute, spawns the next test, sleeps a minute... until the battery is
depleted. If "Max Power Draw" is checked, the sleep periods are
eliminated. Both tests generate three scores: performance score,
battery life score and overall mobile score. The overall mobile
score = ( performance score + battery life score) / 2. The reference
system is a Sharp Actius MP30 with a 1.6GHz Transmeta efficeon.
Additional instructions are shown when these tests are run.

I've
added theme music to the About page which can be called up by the
respective button or by clicking on the logo.

Dothan
L2 cache size is now reported correctly.

Athlon
64 Winchester cores are now identified properly.

Threaded tests are now in red.

Thanks
to its object-oriented design with fully encapsulated data together with its
broad array of threaded tests, OpenSourceMark is one of the best benchmarks
available for evaluating NUMA systems like those based upon AMD Opterons.
OSMark is also very useful for showing the performance benefits from the new
dual-core CPU designs now appearing from Intel and AMD.

Don't
forget that you can view graphs of individual test results by either
clicking on the graph of the test result segment or by clicking on the grid
column header for the test. The grid also sorts results by the clicked
test. The normal graph is restored by clicking in the same place again
on either the graph or the grid.

Look at
"sample_commandline.bat" to see how to script OSMark through 3 Official
Runs. Change "i" to a much higher number like 100 for a very robust
system stress test.

We had
thousands of downloads of Beta 6, but we still have not reached critical
mass where this benchmark is used widely. Please promote
OpenSourceMark.

I write
and run benchmarks and analyze their results for a living. As a
veteran computer hardware analyst and as a CPU R&D engineer, I can honestly
state that OSMark has matured into an outstanding benchmark that fares very
well when compared with any commercial benchmark, while COSBI OpenSourceMark
has the tremendous advantage of being 100% verifiable due its open source
nature.

At work
we have used OpenSourceMark to conduct experiments to dramatically improve
processor performance. We use it daily as a core benchmark for
performance testing, functional testing, system level testing and stability
testing. We also use COSBI OpenSourceMark for debugging platform
issues, performance optimizing platform settings and many other purposes.
COSBI OSMark has proven to be an invaluable tool.

And you
can get it for free along with all of the source code.

Installing OpenSourceMark is quick and easy and doesn't contaminate system
files and doesn't fool around with the registry. Just download the
zipped file and unzip the folder to
wherever you want. To run the benchmark, double-click on "CosbiOpenSourceMark.exe".
If you want official scores, click the "Official Run" button. If you
want the best scores possible, check "Process Idle Tasks" and "Defragment
drive".

The
reference scores were generated at a screen resolution of 1024x768x32 @
75Hz. As with nearly all benchmarks, screen resolution impacts scores.

I am
planning for two more betas before the version 1 Gold. The Beta 8 will
incorporate the thin client test module. Beta 9 will be for bug fixes,
GUI polishing, documentation, integrated help, etc.

If you find any bugs, please post them at COSBI's
forums. And please
help us out by contributing code to OpenSourceMark.

In March,
we reported a whooping cough outbreak in the Austin, Texas area. Since
then, a few mainstream media stories have appeared on the subject. In
this latest article linked above, Arizona has declared a statewide whooping cough outbreak
and is requesting $500,000 to combat it.

Whooping
cough is caused by bacteria. Also known as "pertussis," the recent
outbreaks have been spreading northwards from states bordering Mexico.
Whooping cough had been very uncommon in the United States, but the influx
of illegal aliens into border states has been vectors for
this respiratory malady that can sometimes be fatal, particularly in young
babies.

As
we reported months ago, when we approached our doctor in January he
refused to test our children for whooping cough despite the clear cut
evidence that we presented. We have since discovered that our
experience is not unique. Prior to the publicly announced
outbreak, we have been told that a nurse in the Austin area recognized
that her children had contracted pertussis, but her pediatrician
refused to test them for the disease despite the mother's insistence.

AGEIA
let us know that, in addition to the recently announced NovodeX Sony
PlayStation 3 support, the company also provides equal support for the
upcoming Microsoft Xbox 360. The fabless chip designer is perhaps best
known for its PhysX dedicated Physics Processing Unit (PPU) and the Mountain
View, California company's NovodeX physics libraries are very powerful tools
for game designers seeking to make a quantum leap forward in realism with
next generation game titles.

Although
details regarding the Xbox 360's processor are minimal, it is likely that
the NovodeX toolkit will bring greatest benefits to the PlayStation 3.
The PS3's Cell processor design is highly parallel but very "loose" and
utilizing all of the hardware resources requires difficult, explicit
programming effort. AGEIA's NovodeX physics libraries come to the
rescue of PS3 game designers by tackling the headaches of Cell programming
by providing rich physics effects essentially for free in terms of
processing overhead.

While
the Xbox 360's triple-core IBM developed processor is almost certainly a
more balanced approach for a gaming CPU, the IBM-Sony-Toshiba Cell chip will
likely allow the PS3 to eclipse the Xbox 360 in physics intensive titles.
With equal NovodeX support for both platforms, the physics performance delta
between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 will narrow, but, more importantly,
AGEIA's contributions mean that it is more likely that game developers will
include sophisticated physics effects in upcoming games since porting of
physics code should be transparent thanks to NovodeX.

In the upcoming battle between Microsoft's Xbox 360 and
Sony's PlayStation 3, a huge chink in the armor of the otherwise impressive
sounding PS3 is the very loose parallel architecture of the IBM-Sony-Toshiba
Cell processor. Unlike the XBox 360's traditional 3-way multicore
design that is easy to code to, the Cell processor will be difficult to
utilize at anywhere near its peak theoretical throughput without very
significant programming investment.

However, help is on the way. AGEIA, the makers of a
highly Cell-like physics processor dubbed "PhysX," has announced that it
will be porting its powerful NovodeX physics engine to Cell. With
NovodeX, Playstation 3 designers should be able to easily add highly complex
physics effects to their games without taking much of a performance hit.
Such optimizations should allow for startling levels of realism never before
seen in the console gaming word and will likely raise the bar for what
gamers expect from new gaming systems.

AGEIA's NovodeX libraries alone should ensure that PS3 titles
will have superior game physics than any other contemporary console gaming
system.

In software that does not leverage NovodeX, the Xbox 360
should easily trump the PS3 in titles that demand raw processing power,
especially considering the write-once-port-many mentality necessary in the
high-pressure game development world that makes it very difficult to budget
the time and coding effort necessary to extract the potential from unique
hardware like Cell.

With AGEIA's help, Sony's upcoming PS3 console has suddenly
become much more competitive with Microsoft's Xbox 360.

In a
highly
unpopular move, the United States House of Lords voted unanimously in
favor of legislation calling for the establishment of a National ID Card.
King George is expected to sign the bill into law when it crosses his desk
later this month.

Americans who do not obtain their Nation ID Cards will be
faced with many restrictions. In addition to being barred from
driving, flying and train travel, they will also not be able to open bank
accounts nor will they be allowed to enter federal buildings. It is
highly likely that nearly every aspect of living in the United States will
be negatively impacted for those who attempt to resist the National ID Card
since the card will likely be demanded in every big box retailer as
identification.

Meanwhile, a Cessna 150, an airplane not much larger than a child's kite,
puttered slowly into restricted airspace over the nation's capital causing
widespread government initiated pandemonium.

Exposing
the organization's fascist, globalist, feudalistic nature, only "formally
registered" media existing in countries that are "recognized by the United
Nations General Assembly" are allowed to cover UN events.

E-Mail Bombed

Several
VHJ email accounts have been bombed by virus laden messages that
appear to originate from an XO IP address in Massachusetts (possibly
Cambridge, Massachusetts). The huge number of 75kB messages is enough
to fill up our email accounts in a matter of a few hours.

Consequently, many emails to us have bounced over the last few days.
If we have not responded to messages that you sent us during this time,
please try to resend them.

Mike Magee's computer industry insider news magazine, the inquirer,
is one of the few websites that I consider essential and I check that site
several times daily. I know Mike pretty well and in a business that is
crawling with sell-their-mother-into-slavehood-for-an-ad-contract, deceitful
moneygrubbers, Mike is an honest man and, in that proud, independent
tradition, a good Scotsman.

However,
the anonymously authored Rambus piece posted yesterday on the inquirer
is a disservice to Mike's fine organization.

Of those journalists who hammered Rambus back during the days of the Intel
i820, Rambus' $500 a share cloud-walk and world domination delusions, my
work probably hit the Mountain View, California-based company the hardest.
One of my articles was credited by Reuters, Bloomberg, MSNBC, etc. for
deflating Rambus stock by more than $150 in a single day.

Contrary
to the inquirer piece, I didn't write articles condemning Rambus
because the company was arrogant, although many of its representatives
certainly were. I wrote my articles because I wanted our readers to
know the truth. My articles hurt Rambus so badly because the company
lied all the time and many of the company's falsehoods were very easy to
demonstrate, as were the fabrications spouted by those who peddled Rambus
stock, a group that held truth in about the same lowly regards as Rambus
did.

Perhaps
worst of all, many Rambus investors were driven into a frothy feeding
frenzy. Dreaming of unlimited riches and seeing any Rambus critic as a
threat to their treasure trove, some Rambus investors went over the edge
sending an almost endless stream of abusive and even threatening emails.
When large sums of money are at stake, people can get very nasty.

Of
course, some of the caustic email originated within Rambus itself.
Relatively recently I received an insulting note from Richard Crisp.
The good Mr. Crisp was perhaps the most important Rambus player involved in
the JEDEC SDRAM scandal. Mr. Crisp was Rambus' representative on that
industry standards consortium and was therefore witness to his company's
purported machinations. Some allege that the Mountian View, California
IP company deceived the other JEDEC members into incorporating Rambus
patents into the emerging SDRAM and DDR SDRAM standards. Worse still,
some claim that Rambus later patented ideas discussed in JEDEC meetings.
In both cases, critics maintain that Rambus tried to then hold the entire
DRAM industry hostage to these ill-gotten patents.

These
allegations are consistent with Rambus' evidence-shredding behavior
documented in court.

But much
of my work focused on exposing Rambus's dishonest performance claims for
RDRAM when coupled with Intel's torpid i820 chipset. Moreover, Rambus
and Intel colluded to suppress competing SDRAM technology that would have
been both much cheaper and faster performing.

From the
beginning, I pointed out the benefits of Rambus RDRAM technology like its
lower pin count and higher per pin bandwidth. But from a PC standpoint
in the 133MHz FSB P!!! era, RDRAM was ridiculously expensive and
underperforming despite Rambus' very loud claims to the contrary. And
their host organism, Intel, shouted just as loudly in pushing Rambus' agenda
regardless of the where the truth may lie.

That is
not to say that Intel always supported Rambus on every fronts.
Publicly, Intel was contractually bound to push Rambus at nearly all costs,
but in private signals were not always so clear.

I
remember an instance early in the history of the Rambus saga when I got the
distinct impression that Intel wanted me to continue to expose their lil'
parasite's tactics. On a fine spring day in beautiful Springdale,
Arkansas, I leaned against the counter in my kitchen while I argued over the
phone with Intel's Minister of Desktop Processor Propaganda, George Alfs.
As I stared at the repeating pattern of squares set out by the white ceramic
tile floor, George did what George always does: manipulate.
Perpetually wielding both the carrot and the stick (I think he broke his
stick over my head several times while dealing with me through the years),
George was harshly critical of a recent article that I wrote about Intel,
yet was very complimentary about my Rambus work. Intriguingly, the
Rambus article was far more damaging to that company compared with the
relatively minor impact that my Intel piece had on Chipzilla.

Contrary
to the inq piece, it wasn't the company's failure to engage
journalists nor its arrogance nor its naive ineptitude. Rambus was
skewered by several of us in the media because the memory designer had a
blatant disregard for the truth as it unabashedly sought to conquer the DRAM
market. Greed and dishonesty mix to make a toxic cocktail and we wrote
to protect our readerships from this poisonous brew.

The DRAM
manufacturers' price fixing spider web is condemnable, but it has nothing to
do with Rambus' dirty past. Just because Pol Pot killed more people
doesn't make Vlad the Impaler a nice guy.

So
journalists from the inq and elsewhere, be mindful of the past and
strive for accuracy. Don't paint history with a euphemistic white
wash. If we do not preserve a faithful record of the past, we are
abandoning one of our most important responsibilities and are betraying our
readers as well as our own progeny. In these critical times, we must
hold onto the truth with all or our might.

An
Austin-area environmental group is complaining about chipmaker AMD's plans
to build new headquarters facilities in Southwest Austin. The group
maintains that AMD's 60-acre parcel, currently zoned for commercial
development by the City of Austin, is located over the Barton Springs
Recharge zone and therefore threatens the local aquifer.

While
most green groups readily agree that development and expanding population
are the biggest menaces to our ecosystem, none has made the obvious
connection that illegal immigration is therefore one of the single greatest
threats to the health of the United States' environment.

Ignoring
the impact to wages and job availability, 11 million additional people,
contributing mainly to urban growth, have no doubt taken a toll on the
American environment. Since 14 percent of the illegal immigrant
population is concentrated in Texas alone, that means that the Lone Star
state bears a burden of an additional 1.5 million people that it would not
otherwise have to support if America's borders were as secure as one would
hope, especially if foreign terrorist dangers are as imminent as our federal
government maintains.

The
roughly one-million cars used by illegal immigrants in the state of Texas
is, alone, no doubt significantly deleterious to the state's air and water
quality.

Of
course, automotive borne pollution is small considering the amount of solid
waste generated by 1.5-million people together with the pollution from power
plants producing the energy consumed in their households. And then
there is the urban development required to house and supply this population
along with the expanding road system required to carry the increased
automotive traffic, all issues very near to the core that motivates the
anti-AMD lobby.

Pragmatically, perhaps one of the most potent efforts that an
environmentally concerned person should join is combating the human flood
flowing over our borders. This flood is rapidly pushing the illegal
immigrant count up to 10% of Texas's total population. This percentage
is no doubt already much higher in the state's urban areas like Austin where
the effects of overcrowding are manifest on the area's road system.

Consequently, the activist group calling itself the "Minuteman
Project" might be the most potent, positive citizens-based environmental
force in that state. This group of activists is currently patrolling
the southern Arizona border in what appears to be a largely successful
effort to curb illegal immigration in that area.

So
though they may initially seem strange bedfellows, the "Stop
AMD" green group might find its interests better served it if linked
arms with the Minuteman Project and began patrolling the Texas-Mexico
border.

Thousands of pathology labs across 18 countries are scrambling to destroy
vials of a deadly flu strain sent to them for unknown reasons.

Samples
of the dangerous 1957 H2N2 pandemic flu strain was sent from a U.S. company
to 5,000 labs in 18 countries. Nearly 99 percent of the laboratories
are in the United States. Included in proficiency kits routinely sent
for certification tests, the reasons are unclear why Meridian Bioscience
sent out a variety of influenza that killed between 1-million and 4-million
people half a century ago. The Cincinnati, Ohio based firm had been
contracted by the College of American Pathologists to provide an influenza A
sample from its stockpile for the kits, but for unknown reasons Meridian
Pathology sent out the deadly 1957 strain.

Shipments of the kits began last year and ended in February. The
samples can be killed through incineration or by chemicals.

In a move that will strengthen its position in the Linux world, VIA
Technologies released the Linux and Xorg driver source code for its
UniChrome integrated graphics cores. The drivers work with VIA's
popular CLE266 and new CN400 chipsets featured in the Taiwanese company's
line of diminutive and feature rich miniITX motherboards.

Arkansas's pride and joy quarterback wows the NFL with his unworldly
athletic ability. Here are the numbers:

Height:
6-6¼

Weight:
242

40 time
(hand-timed): 4.37 and 4.39

40 time
(electronic): 4.40

Vertical
jump: 39.5 inches

Standing
broad jump: 10 feet, 9 inches

In a
cynical world hardened by the relentless onslaught of athletes involved in
criminal activities, the only problem that Matt Jones got into at Arkansas
was breaking curfew: prior to a road game, Coach Houston Nutt caught Matt up
late in his room reading the Bible.

This
brings us to 16-year-old Jeff Weise who, on Monday, March 21, killed his
grandfather and his longtime companion, and then went to the school on Red
lake Indian Reservation where he killed nine people and wounded seven
before, like Harris and Klebold, killing himself. Weise was on Prozac, a
medication for depression. Harris and Klebold were both on various
mind-altering medications. Not only did they not help them, but the question
is whether they may have actually contributed to these acts of murder? How
many of the other young killers, dating back to 1997, were also being
medicated? And, while we’re at it, how many young suicide victims were
likewise being medicated?

Something is terribly wrong in this nation when we can experience a
succession of seemingly senseless school killings and not begin to ask
whether the national obsession with drugging an estimated six to seven
million school children isn’t a contributory factor?

“Why is 80 percent of the world’s methylphenidate (Ritalin and Adderall)
being fed to American children?” asked Dr. William B. Carey when he appeared
before a House panel investigating the wide use of psychotropic drugs in
2003. “These drugs have the potential for serious harm and abuse,” noted
Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-DE). “They are listed on Schedule II of the
Controlled Substances Act. “

According to Hugh Fudenberg, MD, the world's leading immunogeneticist and
13th most quoted biologist of our times (nearly 850 papers in peer review
journals), if an individual has had five consecutive flu shots his/her
chances of getting Alzheimer's Disease is ten times higher than if they had
one, two or no shots. I asked Dr. Fudenberg why this was so and he said it
was due to the mercury and aluminum that is in every flu shot (and some
childhood shots). The gradual mercury and aluminum buildup in the brain
causes cognitive dysfunction.

A new
study reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine says that the increased
rate of flu vaccinations since the 1980s have not shown any decrease in flu
related deaths. In fact such deaths in the over 65s have actually increased.

Want
to avoid both autism and Alzheimers? Then forget the flu vaccine and avoid
dental amalgams

March 31st,
2005

More on
Whooping Cough Outbreak in Austin, Texas

Mary's
family, mentioned below in the article confirming a whooping cough outbreak
in the Austin area, has received the results from the health department's
whooping cough tests. All three of Mary's family members who were
swabbed have tested positive for whooping cough.

ATi Radeon Catalyst OpenGL Bug?

We have
confirmed an OpenSourceMark issue reported to us by Karl W. involving the
two OpenGL tests. When running ATi Radeon drivers version
6.14.10.6517, both the "Lorenz Attractor" and the "N-Body OpenGL" tests will
fail at initialization. We have also determined that the same problem
exists across several other programs developed in GLScene, the Open Source
library that we use to produce OpenGL tests.

Since
OpenSourceMark has been successfully tested on virtually every modern video
core from nVidia to VIA to SiS to ATi (prior to driver version 6.14.10.6517)
to even the Geode GX, and because the problem has been shown to be broader
than simply OSMark, this suggests that there is a bug in the latest ATi
video drivers.

We have
reported this bug to ATi, but have not received a reply yet.

Ironically, the OpenSourceMark OpenGL tests were developed on a system
utilizing an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 and ATi cores have fared well on these
tests.

March 29th,
2005

Whooping Cough Outbreak Confirmed in Austin, Texas

Following our notice yesterday about an evident whooping cough outbreak in
the Austin, Texas area, we received the following confirmation from Mary
today:

Apparently the whooping cough is going around the area. There have been 7
confirmed cases in the past 2 weeks which is apparently high. I don't know
where we got it from, but according to the Health Dept. we meet all of the
criteria. Two of my children and my husband were swabbed last week at the
health department. We're waiting for the results. We haven't been out of
the house since my son started coughing and 2 weeks later my youngest.
Which is good because this is when they are the most contagious.

We have
also received an email from Lora stating that the health department is now
conducting a whooping cough investigation of a music class that Mary's
children attended.

Here are
Kathy's remarks:

As I
told several people over the last few weeks, I think that our entire family
had whooping cough.

My doctor would not test us for it.

We went in at the end of February to the doctor, which is when I decided
that our symptoms, by that time 2nd stage, seemed to be whooping cough.
Despite the overwhelming evidence for whooping cough, our doctor insisted
that our girls didn't have the disease and would not test for it.
However, he treated the girls with Zithromax which is an antibiotic
typically prescribed for whooping cough.

If we had whooping cough -- and I am virtually certain that we did -- I
think that we picked it up sometime in January as Hattie showed classic
symptoms of the 1st stage in the first week of February. She was treated
that week with antibiotics.

Karl W.
writes us:

I
realize your concern for your kids but its OK. I had whooping cough when I
was kid and was quite sick for a couple of weeks, in fact all the kids in my
neighborhood had it at the same time (conveniently arranged by our parents).
I was raised in England where whooping cough is just one of those childhood
diseases that every gets, I have also had chicken pox and mumps (while young
enough not to harm me reproductively).

The death rate from whooping cough (in 1st world countries) is lower than
the death rate from the vaccine. And your kids will have a permanent
immunity to the disease that can't be equaled from the vaccine.

I know you are terrified everytime they hack their little lungs up, just
ease them through it and don't let them catch your panic. My mum swore by
vicks vapor rub. In a couple of weeks they will be right as rain. That being
said if they do appear not to breath or change color (blueish) call 911.

Finally,
Mary writes:

So,
if you or any of your family members are experiencing a nagging cough which
has lasted more than 3 weeks and you have never had a cough like this
before, you might have need for concern. It can be misdiagnosed as anything
from asthma, bronchitis (in my youngest child's case), allergies, etc.
Here's a web page with tons of information:
http://www.whoopingcough.net/main.htm.

March 28th,
2005

Whooping Cough Outbreak in Austin, Texas?

Our
children are recovering from a persistent cough that is very obviously
whooping cough. Strangely, our doctor insisted that the girls did not
have whooping cough, when their symptoms absolutely indicate that he is
wrong.

For many
people whooping cough manifests as a lingering spate of coughing bouts.
For others, particularly small children, the coughing bouts can be very
severe and accompanied with loud whooping sounds as they struggle to intake
air -- breathing can become very difficult and is complicated by choking
promoted by the thick mucous coughed up. The coughing episodes can be
very frightening to witness and can induce panic in those afflicted.
People can seem normal between coughing attacks, although energy levels are
reduced. The illness persists for about six weeks.

Whooping
cough can be dangerous and the whooping cough vaccination is not very
effective.

We moved
our children into our room at night so that we could care for them when they
woke up in coughing fits. We maintained 24-hour watch for several
weeks on the two girls most severely ill. We attempted to isolate Evie,
who was initially not infected, and this seems to have helped greatly reduce
the severity of her case.

When
whooping cough is properly diagnosed, antibiotics are often prescribed to
prevent bacteriological infection.

Whooping
cough is sometimes misdiagnosed as "walking pneumonia" since large amounts
of mucous are often coughed up and can be accompanied with a low grade fever
particularly in the early stages of this malady.

Medical Freedom

A reader
sends us this quote from Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the
Declaration of Independence:

The
Constitution of the Republic should make special provision for Medical
Freedom as well as Religious Freedom. To restrict the art of healing to
one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the
Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic.
They are fragments of monarchy and have no place in a republic.

We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The
extraordinary men who founded the United States chose their words carefully
when they established this country, the greatest nation in the history of
the world. While our basic rights are enumerated in the first ten
amendments to our Constitution and eloquently condensed in the quote above
from our Declaration of Independence, nowhere will you find mention of a
"right to die." In fact, America's Founding Fathers would be shocked
that our democratic republic with its long history of self sacrifice in the
cause of freedom would ever be interested in codifying such a dangerous
notion.

For with each step that our nation takes toward diluting the
sanctity of human life, the more power that is given to the federal
government. And we must always consider the ways that this power might
be abused should our nation drift further towards tyranny and despotism.

In Hitler's Germany the government initiated euthanasia
programs that initially targeted the retarded, "mentally defective" and
insane. These outcasts were systematically dehumanized through
propaganda. In time the German people were desensitized enough not to
rise up in the defense of these forsaken individuals even though Nazi
Germany's euthanasia programs might mean the deaths of close family members.

Eventually the definitions of "insane" and "mentally
defective" grew elastic allowing the government to chose victims at whim
while the horrors of Nazi gas chambers became perfected inside eagerly
willing German mental institutions.

And why were so many scientists and doctors enthusiastically
complicit to the mass murders committed inside Hitler's Germany?
Because men of science and psychiatry were deified in propaganda as the
salvation of Germany, as they were portrayed as evidence for the triumph of
man over God. Killing God was necessary in order to establish morally
relativistic laws such as the euthanasia programs. And those
scientists and doctors that criticized the government often found themselves
branded insane, shipped to work camps or killed outright.

In Hitler's Germany, everyone had a "right to die" and the
state exercised this power vigorously against any people it viewed as
threatening.

And so it was in Joseph Stalin's USSR where perhaps
20-million people "rightfully died" in the name of Communism. Twice
this number perished under Mao's boot in China. The Chinese found that
Hirohito's Imperial Japan was just as willing to impose a "right to die."

Today in Florida, the state is denying a woman food and drink
in order to kill her, while our televisions show images of jackbooted ASPCA
"police" hauling off impoverished fathers to jail for treating family pets
similarly. Thusly, the worth of human life sinks below that of animal
lives in a culture whose values have become unmoored and confused.

In order to see beyond the insanity of our times, we must
always ask ourselves how any new powers that we hand to the state might be
abused in the case that our next President is another Pol Pot or is Hitler's
second coming. We must constantly work to reinforce and sanctify the
value of human life in order to safeguard our nation from creeping threats
of despotism.

The laws of our nation must be our citadel against tyrants,
men that continually attack America from both without and within.

The war
drums beat louder and louder. This latest event follows closely on the
heels of Monday's news that China's parliament enacted a
law authorizing force against the beautiful, peaceful isle of Formosa.

The "Second Vermont Republic" is a movement that seeks to
"peacefully and democratically free" Vermont from the United States.
Some of the group's goals are:

Political Independence. Our primary objective is to extricate Vermont
peacefully from the United States as soon as possible.

Direct Democracy. Vermont's strong democratic tradition is grounded in its
town meetings which have served as the state's political mainstay for over
two centuries. We favor devolution of power from the federal and state
governments back to local communities and the extension of participatory
democracy to the workplace and the farm..

Sustainability. We celebrate and support Vermont's small, clean, green,
sustainable, socially responsible towns, farms, businesses, schools, and
churches. We encourage family owned farms and businesses to produce
innovative, premium-quality, high-value added, healthy products. We also
believe that energy independence is an essential goal towards which to
strive.

Economic Solidarity. We encourage Vermonters to buy locally produced
products from small local merchants rather than from giant, out-of-state
mega stores. We support trade with nearby states and provinces.

Quality Education. We would return to local Vermont communities the
control and financing of small local schools.

Wellness. We encourage small locally controlled health care systems
similar to those found in Switzerland in which, unlike the United States,
patients, physicians, clinics, hospitals, and insurance providers are all
in community with one another.

Nonviolence. Consistent with Vermont's long history of nonviolence, we do
not condone state-sponsored violence inflicted either by military or law
enforcement officials. However, we do support a voluntary citizens'
militia to restore order in the event of political unrest or natural
disasters. We are unconditionally opposed to any form of military
conscription.

COSBI
AcroBench is a unique benchmark that is useful for testing the performance
merits of x86 CPUs for printer engine applications.

x86 CPUs
are beginning to show up in printers, yet there are no benchmarks available
to help printer vendors assess microprocessor performance. COSBI
AcroBench is an attempt to remedy that condition.

The
widely used Adobe Acrobat program performs document rendering actions that
are analogous to printer workloads. When Acrobat renders a PDF
document for display, the CPU is crunching through a compressed
PostScript-derived script. PostScript is Adobe's page description
programming language used in many printers.

Despite
the superficial 2d operations of scrolling and scaling, AcroBench is very
CPU dependent since interpreting the PDF code is the gating factor in this
benchmark.

The
current version of AcroBench only supports Acrobat 6 which you can download
here. Acrobat 6 must be installed before AcroBench will run.

A future
version of AcroBench is targeted to support Adobe's brand new Acrobat 7.

To run
AcroBench, download the compressed file and unzip to a known location while
preserving the directory structure. Double-click
Command_AcroBench.bat to begin (or you can double-click on
AcroBench.vbs). The results will be automatically saved to a text
file with a name based upon the processor id string generated by the COSBI
system identification tool.

While we
released the source code to OSMark v1.0
beta 6 yesterday (along with code for several other tools), if you just want
to run the benchmark, click on the link above to download the zipped
executable. To run OSMark, just unzip the file while preserving its
directory structure and then double-click on "CosbiOpenSourceMark.exe".
In order to generate and overall score, you'll need to click on the
"Official Run" button.

As
promised, click on the above link to download the full source code for COSBI
OSMark (~34MB). Also included is the source code for several utilities
and standalone tools like BandwidthBurn, MemLatencyPlus, WhetBurn, CPUSpeed
and others. Everything is released under
GPL.

OSMark
v1.0 beta 6 is compiled in Delphi 7, but should be easily upgradeable to
Delphi 2005.

You will
need to install the
Graphics32 libraries in order to compile OSMark.

There
are coding instructions in the OSMark subdirectory under the filename "OSMarkCodingDocumentation.html".
These instructions will be posted and expanded upon in the COSBI OSMark
Forums.

But most importantly, you can
request new tests, post your source code for new tests, participate in the
COSBI development process, or examine pending source code updates.

The
objective of the Comprehensive Open Source Benchmarking Initiative is to be
completely inclusive. This means that no tests
will be rejected unless they are redundant or clearly useless.
Even in those cases, you can still post your source code and make a case for
your test on the forums.

Although
the GUI is written in Delphi 7, tests can be submitted in any language that
does not require runtime libraries. See "OSMarkCodingDocumentation.html"
for an example of how to incorporate executables written in other languages.

We'll
also be introducing parallel projects in Kylix, and cross platform efforts
in C++ (namely g++). We've also got a few application level benchmarks
developed in Visual Test that will soon debut.

Over the
following weeks, more details and updates will be posted here and at the
forums.

Autism Society of America (ASA), the nation’s oldest and
largest organization dedicated to the supporting individuals and families
dealing with autism, is pleased to announce its support of the bipartisan
move by Congressman David Weldon, MD (FL-15) and Congresswoman Carolyn
Maloney (D-NY) to assure the removal of childhood mercury exposure through
vaccines. HR 881, the “Mercury Free Vaccine Act of 2005” was introduced last
week in the US House of Representatives.

Here is
our most recent beta of COSBI OSMark. It fixes all known bugs and
refines several tests such as Mandelbrot which now looks a lot better and
cycles colors over runs. Scores have also been properly readjusted
against a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 with HyperThreading and with an 800MHz FSB.

We're
also posting a simple system
information command line utility that is useful for scripting. The
program's output can be redirected into a text file which can serve to
quickly document a system's configuration.

Come
Hell or high water, we're going to release a snapshot of all of the
Comprehensive Open Source Benchmarking Initiative source code next week.

February
8th,
2005

Mini-Bits & Bytes: A Tejas Tidbit and a Mini-Mac

Several years ago we exclusively revealed the existence of
Intel's now defunct Tejas project along with a few of the project's design
objectives for replacing the Prescott Pentium 4.

One item that we did not mention is that "Fireball" would be
snuffed out.

According to our sources, the P4's double-pumped ALUs,
codenamed "Fireball," were serving as a speed path and would be excised from
Tejas in order for the Pentium 4 architecture to continue to scale to higher
clock speeds.

A couple of years later, of course, Intel
dropped the entire P4 hot potato for reasons that we had written about
from the start of that ill-conceived computin' architecture.

On a slightly different topic...

I've seen numerous Pentium-M articles explore that chip's
desktop performance and laud that CPU for it strengths on many applications
like office productivity stuff and gaming, while at the same time lament
about P-M's underwhelming media encoding and floating point throughput.
There's no debating the fact that the P-M has a weaker FPU than the Athlon
64, but the P-M's FPU is still quite potent.

Apple has released its mini-sized Macintosh dubbed the "MacMini"
and it is a very, very nice computer. The operating system is a thing
of beauty.

To gain a little performance insight, I've written a few
cross-platform benchmarks and the 1.42GHz G4 miniMac thumped a 3.4GHz
Northwood P4 on three out of four tests. If time permits (and readers
request it), I might write up a small miniMac review.

One MacMini performance anomaly is in the thin-client area.
The tiny and almost silent Apple system seems nearly perfect for thin-client
applications, but when I benchmarked its Microsoft-produced RDP client, the
MacMini was one of the slowest platforms that I have ever tested. Of
course, with its donated RDP client program, the Beast of Redmond may have
laid a flaming bag of poop on the doorstep of Apple to make sure that no
WinCE/WinXP-E licenses would be lost to Mr. Jobs.

Speaking of Mr. Steve Jobs, he has apparently fully recovered
from a recent pancreatic cancer scare.

BTW, the MacMini ships with very, very robust programming
tools! Kudos to Apple for giving the new Macs big time geek bonus
points.

And one last thing about the miniMac: use your own 5-button,
scroll wheel equipped USB mouse-creatures and leave Apple's single-button
jobs at the store. OS X fully exploits all five buttons along with
the scroll wheel and, so endowed, the OS becomes a much more enjoyable
experience.

multi-core butterflies...

As you all know, I do a lot of benchmarking. I recently
tested a dual-processing Linux system and noticed much greater than expected
scaling when going from one processor to two. Although I anticipated
nearly 100% performance improvements when running multithreaded code, I saw
scaling well above this. I even saw significant scaling on
single-threaded tests!

These results seem initially very odd until you realize that
there are a few Linux processes and commonly running utilities that are real
big resource pigs. The X windowing system alone is a sizable sow and
is almost constantly hogging a bunch of CPU cycles. As a result, the
dual-processing system was also much, much more responsive when opening
programs, browsing the web, redrawing the screen, compiling and other
normal, everyday tasks.

In any case, the upcoming tidal wave of dual-core chips will
serve Linux a big kick-in-the-pants performance-wise.

Linux has come a long way over the last few years and new
desktop distributions like Linspire 5 are probably giving Microsoft whiplash
from looking over its hunched-back shoulders.

We've
finally fixed the notorious "1.01" floating point bug in the GridBlastFP
test. This subtle problem only hit users in countries that do not use
a period for the radix point, which explains why we were never able to
reproduce the error.

The
radix point separates the whole part from the fractional part of a floating
point number. While the U.S., Britain and many other countries use a
"." for this purpose, Germany and several other nations us a comma (",") for
doing this.

Special
thanks to Rolf for suggesting that the GridBlastFP problem was a regional
issue. Although we've had numerous reports of the "1.01" bug, it was
never apparent that the problem was occurring primarily outside the U.S.

We
failed to mention in our last post that there are now a lot of multithreaded
benchmarks in OSMark. Many of these tests will automatically use every
available processor in the system. We have added so many threaded
tests in order to be ready for upcoming dual-core chips.

One
interesting performance observation is that there appears to be a big
performance advantage for ATI-based video cards over nVidia-based video
cards on OSMark, particularly on the OpenGL tests.

We are looking for additional SSE/SSE2/SSE3, as well as
DirectX and OpenGL tests. Submitted benchmarks are acceptable written in any
compiler that does not require runtime support. Non-Delphi benchmarks
should deploy a fixed workload automatically when called from the command
line and terminate at completion. The OSMark shell will automatically
time and score the application time. Tests should take no longer than a
minute to run on a fast system. All source code will need to be GPL'ed.

If you are interested in contributing tests to OSMark then send us a note
here. No test will be rejected unless it is redundant!
One of the most important and basic goals behind COSBI OpenSourceMark is to
be totally inclusive, allowing the user to decide which tests are useful and
which are not. Eventually we will roll out a "MyMark" button that will
execute and score a user customized benchmark suite.

As always, if you find any bugs, please
let us know. And thanks to those who have been sending in reports!

We are
releasing today the first public beta of COSBI OpenSourceMark Version 1.0.
The program has changed extensively and now all COSBI tools are integrated
within OSMark. New tests have also been added.

Mobile and Thin Client tests are forthcoming, but all other
aspects of the program should be operational.

We are looking for additional SSE/SSE2/SSE3, as well as
DirectX and OpenGL tests. Submitted benchmarks are acceptable in any
compiler that does not require runtime support. Non-Delphi tests
should deploy a fixed workload automatically when called from the command
line and terminate at completion. Tests should take no longer than a
minute to run on a fast system. All source code will need to be GPL'ed.

If you are interested in contributing tests -- and no test
will be rejected unless it is redundant -- to OSMark, send us a note
here.

In a
what could turn out to be a very chilling strike against free speech, the
United State Federal Bureau of Investigation has raided one of the
Internet's most influential independent media organizations. The
following
quote comes from the Argentina Indymedia website.

US
authorities issued a federal order to Rackspace's office in the US
ordering them to provide Indymedia's hardware located in London to the
requesting agency. Rackspace is one of Indymedia's web hosting providers
with offices in the US and London. Rackspace complied, without first
notifying Indymedia, and turned over Indymedia's server in the UK. This
affects some 20+ Indymedia sites worldwide.

Since the subpoena was issued to Rackspace and not to Indymedia, the
reasons for this action are still unknown to Indymedia. Talking to
Indymedia volunteers, Rackspace stated that "they cannot provide Indymedia
with any information regarding the order." ISPs have received gag orders
in similar situations which prevent them from updating the concerned
parties on what is happening.

It is unclear to Indymedia how and why a server that is outside the US
jurisdiction can be seized by US authorities.

At the same time a second server was taken down at Rackspace which
provided streaming radio to several radio stations, BLAG (linux distro),
and a handful of miscellanous things.

The last few months have seen
numerous attacks on independent media by the US Federal Government. In
August the Secret Service used a subpoena in an attempt to disrupt the NYC
IMC before the RNC by trying to get IP logs from an ISP in the US and the
Netherlands. Last month the FCC shut down community radio stations around
the US. Two weeks ago the FBI requested that Indymedia takes down a post
on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police and IMC
volunteers in Seattle were visited by the FBI on the same issue. On the
other hand, Indymedia and other independent media organisations were
successfull with their victories for example against Diebold and the
Patroit Act. Today however, the US authorities shut down IMCs around the
world.

The
proposed Senate Bill S. 2560, also known as the "INDUCE Act," is currently
sneaking its way through Congress and contains language that could make
Linspire's next operating system illegal.

But Linspire 5.0 may
not be legal if the INDUCE Act is passed, since it could be used to
"induce" file sharing. And it's not just Linspire that will be affected,
since a wide range of both hardware and software devices could be
interpreted to induce file sharing. When I started
MP3.com,
the music industry wanted to outlaw MP3 and portable music players, but
the law did not support them. If the INDUCE Act had been law back then, we
may never have seen the MP3 market bloom as it has. They would have surely
attempted to use this law to stop MP3. I encourage you to find out where
your representative stands on the INDUCE Act, and do what you can to
prevent it. Visit
ClickTheVote.org to send a fax to your congressman and find other easy
steps you can take to help prevent the INDUCE Act from becoming law.
Linspire 5.0 is depending on you!

Love him
or hate him, you have to give Kyle credit for consistently stating his mind.
This time Kyle has riled up FutureMark, the makers of 3dMark05.
FutureMark is threatening to sue Kyle for his published opinions about
3DMark.

From
this vantage point, it looks like Kyle is clearly in the right. Kyle's
complaints over the years about 3dMark have generally been thoughtful albeit
sometimes coarsely expressed.

This
could turn into a public relations fiasco for FutureMark, which would be
disastrous for a company whose fortunes, as a benchmark purveyor, are based
upon establishing and maintaining the trust of the media and the public.

Incidents of neurological disorders among children have
exploded over
the last two decades. Anecdotal and formally derived evidence -- even
studies
conducted and later buried by the CDC -- have shown a link between the
highly toxic mercury-based preservative thimerosal and disorders such as
autism. Autism rates among children closely track their increased
exposure to thimerosal-laced vaccines over the same timeframe.

Despite
media propaganda to the contrary, which has outlandishly even attempted to portray autism
as an evolutionary step forwards, autism is an often very devastating
neurological disorder which can profoundly impair a child's ability to
interact with other people.

There is
no doubt whatsoever that thimerosal is virulently toxic. The main
excuse for adding it to inoculations is to reduce costs, particularly when
vaccines are delivered in multi-dose containers.

"It is
just too damn toxic," says Boyd Haley, chairman of the Chemistry Department
at the University of Kentucky. "You can't do a study showing it (thimerosal)
is safe," Dr. Haley maintains in a UPI
investigation
we initially linked to last year. "I know that they (the CDC) knows and
that is what bothers me more than anything else," he stated.

Thimerosal-tainted vaccines expose children to up to 125-times the EPA safe
limits set for mercury. Mercury is a well understood, potent
neurotoxin known for directly causing neurological disorders analogous to
those observed in immunized children.

Well,
Dr. Haley has been proven wrong, at least in practice. Two new "studies"
out of England conclude that Thimerosal is actually good for children.
So, presumably, not only should we stop taking it out of vaccines, but we
might have reason to add it back!

Immunizing infants with vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal may
actually be associated with improved behavior and mental performance,
according to two British studies published in the medical journal
Pediatrics.

Mark
Sircus, writes the following comments about the Reuters article linked
above:

Almost a year ago
I wrote the Dark Ages of Medicine but nothing could have prepared
me for what I read yesterday from Reuters Health News on an essay
published in Pediatric medical journal. If there is any article that
single-handedly destroys the integrity of modern medicine and the field of
pediatrics we have it in hand. It really is a sad day for medical science
and medical journals for what has been published destroys the concept of
peer review and the integrity of epidemiological studies and evidence.

When
Londoner Cat Stevens boarded his plane to Wasington this morning, the singer,
famous for wildly popular '70s songs like "Peace Train," "Morning Has
Broken," "Moonshadow" and "Father and Son," was probably not thinking that
he was a threat to United States national security.

But in
the increasingly bizarre world of Homeland Security, Stevens, who now calls
himself "Yusuf Islam" after becoming a Muslim decades ago, is apparently
considered such a threat to our country that the United Airlines
transatlantic airliner he boarded was diverted to Bangor, Maine where Yusuf
Islam was barred entry into the U.S..

Islam,
whose gentle tunes iconized popular pacifist sentiments of the 1970s, still
maintains his connection with his old "Cat
Stevens" moniker and has publicly condemned acts of terror
committed under the guise of the Islamic religion. Nevertheless, Homeland Security is
protecting us from Cat Stevens, and has the "Peace Train" author booked on the first
flight back to London on Wednesday.

Of
course if Yusuf Islam was really concerned about gaining entry into the U.S.
to undermine national security, he'd just cross the U.S.-Mexican border
where
thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants successfully enter our
country everyday. The tidal wave of illegal immigrants coming
across our borders is ill-reported in the corporate press and neither is the
fact that this influx has stepped up with Bush's talk of amnesty and
promises of Social Security for aliens who obtain illegal entry into the
United States of America.

Our
border with our southern neighbor is so poorly guarded that an
activist group successful
brought across simulated backpack nukes several times, with one
successful attempt ending on the doorsteps of the Tuscon, Arizona Federal
Building.

So the
diversion of Cat Stevens's flight is either a propaganda stunt pulled off to
elevate the profile of Homeland Security, or a head spinning demonstration
of the idiocy in charge of our government who leaves our borders wide open
while sending our troops into imperialistic quagmires in Iraq and
Afghanistan. In either case, we should be worried.

American
troops have been placed in impossible positions in Iraq. The sometimes
ruthless police state tactics deployed in that war-savaged country in order
to "pacify" Iraqi resistance take tolls on the souls of the haggard and
threatened soldiers. Without proper leadership, instances of moral and
ethical degradation are common and severe.

In the
increasing likelihood that martial law will be declared here in the U.S.,
these same hardened and ill-prepared troops will be policing our cities, our
streets, our schools and even our homes.

Read the
article above for a sobering preview of what military law could be like in
the United States in the not too distant future.

And we
don't have to wait for the police state tactics deployed in Iraq to be
brought stateside. During the Republication National Convention in New
York, sonic cannon weapons were rolled out on the streets with fanfare.
Soon to see action in Iraq are microwave guns mounted onto armored vehicles
euphemistically called "Sheriffs". While this article
here gleefully discusses the intense physical pain caused by these
weapons, no mention is made of what would happen if beams are shot into
people's eyes or if the microwaves were trained on individuals for prolonged
periods of time.

Sixty
years ago the Netherlands was under the boot of Hitler's Germany.
Today, the Dutch medical establishment appears bent on returning to Nazi
eugenic ideals.

First, Dutch euthanasia advocates said that patient killing will be limited
to the competent, terminally ill who ask for it. Then, when doctors began
euthanizing patients who clearly were not terminally ill, sweat not, they
soothed: medicalized killing will be limited to competent people with
incurable illnesses or disabilities. Then, when doctors began killing
patients who were depressed but not physically ill, not to worry, they told
us: only competent depressed people whose desire to commit suicide is
"rational" will have their deaths facilitated. Then, when doctors began
killing incompetent people, such as those with Alzheimer's, it's all under
control, they crooned: non-voluntary killing will be limited to patients who
would have asked for it if they were competent.

And
now they want to euthanize children.

NOTE: Although The Weekly Standard is a
well known American publication and is owned by
News Corporation, a
reader writes:

I
live in Belgium, that's a small country next to Holland and am myself of
dutch origins. I must say I NEVER heard of such abuses concerning
euthanasia there. You should know Belgium and Holland have pretty narrow
communication between each other (similar culture, mostly same language,
...) and this is the first time I read about this. In fact, I've seen
quite some documentaries on euthanasia in Holland and it didn't seemed to
be returning to Nazi ideals AT ALL. In fact, I think it's very well
regulated.

Please double check your sources on that one (or this Wesley J. Smith
should), what you're saying is pretty harsh.

A UPI
report that has investigated the casualty data released by the U.S. Pentagon
has concluded that the current total of 8,264 casualties falls nearly 17,000
casualties short.

The
military has evacuated 16,765 individual service members from Iraq and
Afghanistan for injuries and ailments not directly related to combat,
according to the U.S. Transportation Command, which is responsible for the
medical evacuations. Most are from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

...

The
casualty reports do list soldiers who died in non-combat-related incidents
or died from illness. But service members injured or ailing from the same
non-combat causes (the majority that appear to be "lost to the
organization") are not reflected in those Pentagon reports.

In the
September 14th issue of the journal Neurology, a new study reports
that the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine is linked with a threefold
increased risk of multiple sclerosis.

Originally developed for teenagers and adults, the hepatitis vaccine failed
to gain a foothold in its target market. Its developers then lobbied
to force the jab on infants. It is now nearly impossible to give birth
in an American hospital without doctors and nurses pressuring parents into
accepting this unnecessary vaccine.

Worse
still, some hepatitis B immunizations still contain the highly toxic
mercury-based preservative Thimerosal. Thimerosal has been widely
linked to increased instances of autism and other neurological disorders.

The jig is up. It is now becoming obvious that oilman and U.S.
President G.W. Bush's primary motive for entrenching our country in the
Iraqi quagmire was not to protect our country from "weapons of mass
destruction" but to control the vast petroleum reserves of Iraq while lining
the pockets of his Halliburton buddies in the ensuing rebuilding efforts.

Even after the initial "War on Terror" ruse for invading Iraq is becoming
increasingly transparent and while American men and women continue to die in
Iraq, many U.S. citizens have attempted to rationalize Bush's imperialistic
oil gambit. Certainly America is dependent on foreign oil isn't it?

Yes, but it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, the internal
combustion engines that power our cars could be fueled by renewable and
environmentally friendly alternatives like vegetable oil and alcohol.

And this
is not a new concept. Rudolph Diesel's "first diesel engine suitable
for practical use" drank peanut oil. Diesel envisioned a world where
the "commonfolk" could produce their own renewable energy source at a time
when monopolies controlled almost all energy production (and still do).

Unfortunately, Rudolph Diesel died under somewhat mysterious circumstances
in 1913 when he disappeared over the side of a ship en route to England and
"biodiesel" lost one of its most influential proponents.

Like
vegetable oil, alcohol is a readily renewable and environmentally friendly
resource derived from common crops. And like vegetable oil, alcohol
was initially a fuel of choice for internal combustion engines. The
first prototype internal combustion engine built in 1826 ran off of alcohol
and turpentine. Alcohol powered German inventor Nicholas August Otto's
first four-stroke engine. Otto's four-stroke engine was the direct
ancestor to motors used in most cars today.

Thomas
Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were both proponents of fuel alcohol.
Henry Ford's first car ran on "farm alcohol," or commonly distilled ethanol.
Like vegetable oil, ethanol, the preferred alcohol fuel derived from crops,
is nontoxic. In fact, ethanol is the "kick" in spirits such as whiskey
and moonshine.

A major
setback for the use of either vegetable oil or alcohol as fuels occurred in
the 1920s and 30s when Big Oil poured money into the development of
petroleum driven engines. Over the years, Big Oil has also funded
propaganda efforts to discredit petroleum alternatives and has often worked
to produce legislation that impede the adoption of anything other than
petroleum based fuels.

Certainly Prohibition, ratified in 1917 and enforced for 13-years beginning
in 1920, came at a bad time for the alcohol fuel proponents since regional
distilleries were put out of business all over the country and alcohol
became much more valuable in the illegal booze trade than in powering
automobiles.

Today,
while there is a major thrust for hybrid engines and fuel cells, a
grassroots movement to resurrect the use of crop derived fuels, particularly
vegetable oil, has been gaining momentum.

Although
alcohol fuel
proponents are also
growing in
number, kits and "how-tos" about converting existing diesel engines for
use with vegetable oil are popping up all over the Web. Many engines
will work with "biodiesel" without modification. In addition to the
main link above, you can read more about this issue
here,
here,
here,
here,
here, and
here.

Not surprisingly, Great Britain, an insanely regulated
country whose people we lambasted yesterday for allowing universal gun
confiscation along with the consequential proliferation of Big Brother
surveillance cameras all over that nation, is
sending
in the tax Nazis to arrest people who buy vegetable oil in the grocery
story and pour it into their cars as fuel.

While mainstream press loves to cover hybrid
engines and fuel cell development, alternatives like biodiesel empower
people to be self sufficient while combating the environmental poisons of
the oil industry. In our quest for alternative fuels, biodiesel is a
cheap, clean, readily obtainable solution that car companies should revisit.

With Americans dying in Iraq in an effort to
control foreign oil reserves, Americans should take a look at the history of
internal combustion engines to rediscover the fuels we should have been
using all along.

According to the gushing CNN article linked above, there are about 4.2
million closed circuit surveillance cameras in the U.K. that lovingly watch
over the sheepish and damp British population. Of course,
violent crime continues
to explode there, but the British government, never a body to let an
opportunity to extend its hegemony go to waste, is making sure that it takes
full advantage of its fearful, trembling, timorous subjects' supplication
for a loving, all seeing, all powerful Big Brother.

Doubtlessly, the mild mannered British subjects are comforted by the
knowledge that each one of them are scrutinized by an average of 300 cameras
each day despite the fact that
serious violent crime continues to skyrocket all around them.

September 16th, 2004

1GHz VIA C7 to Consume Only 3.5W

VIA
Technologies announced today that its next-generation x86 processor will be
marketed under the "C7"
moniker. Known previously by the codenames "Esther" and "C5J," the C7
will sip at maximum power a measly
3.5W at 1GHz. The C7 will also scale upwards to 2GHz and perhaps even higher.

With an
FSB that runs up to 800MHz and with full SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 support, the C7
should serve a significant performance bump upwards for VIA's line of
low-power microprocessors. The C7 also boasts NX compatibility for
resilience against buffer overrun-driven computer viruses.

VIA also
extends its sizable lead in the security arena by integrating into C7
powerful RSA encryption and Secure Hashing (SHA-1 and SHA-256) features.
This goes beyond the C7's AES and random number generation abilities that
debuted with the chipmaker's "Nehemiah" C3.

At under
32mm^2, the C7 packs around 26,200,000 transistors into an unbelievably tiny
die that is produced using IBM's most advanced 90nm SOI technology.
With the combination of the C7's miniscule die and IBM's 12" wafers, expect
VIA to see nearly a whopping 2,000 C7 die candidates from each wafer.

The VIA
C7 looks to be a very formidable microprocessor for the low power x86
applications that VIA has traditionally pursued.

Although
the President of Taiwan pointed out that such a decision would be tantamount
to "political apartheid," the communist People's Republic of China waged
another successful attempt to isolate the small, but beautiful island nation
formerly called Formosa.

Chen argued the resolution dealt with China's right to represent its
people, not those of Taiwan. He said the resolution was being
misinterpreted and distorted by China.

"Taiwan is Taiwan," Chen said. "Taiwan cannot and will not fight to
represent China."

"A
free and democratic country like Taiwan should not be the missing piece in
the United Nations' principle of universality," he said.

Chen's briefing was held at a hotel near U.N. headquarters because of U.N.
officials' objections to hosting it in the complex where Taiwan is not
represented. The U.N. Correspondents Association strongly protested the
U.N. Secretariat's refusal to allow the video conference at the United
Nations.

In the
U.S., the fascist nature of the United Nations is becoming clear to more and
more people with several third party U.S. Presidential candidates now openly
lobbying for both the withdrawal of the United States from the U.N. and the
expulsion of that corporately driven, global government-in-waiting
monstrosity out of our country.

What
is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If
men were angels, no government would be necessary. In framing a government
which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in
this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in
the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is,
no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught
mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Russia closes border with Georgia to road traffic from Wednesday and its
skies to Georgian air traffic from Oct 1 claiming unpaid debts. However,
similar curbs imposed Tuesday also on Russian border with Azerbaijan.

"Intel was definitely
blindsided by the thermal issues around clock speed and leakage," said
Martin Reynolds, a senior analyst with Dataquest.

Readers of VHJ
will beg to differ with Mr. Reynolds since we have been reporting these
very shortcomings of Intel's Pentium 4 designs since that processor line's
inception several years ago. The irony is that instead of heeding
our advice, Intel covertly sent us nasty letters and tried to undermine
our site in various ways in order to stop us from telling the truth.

Of course, although
the chip giant is now following our advice to the letter by committing to
Pentium M derived desktop designs and going multicore, the company waited
so long that Intel is in worse shape than many recognize right now.

The
torch relay, which culminates in Friday's ceremonial lighting of the flame
at the Olympic stadium, was a creation of Adolf Hitler, who tried to turn
the 1936 Berlin Games into a celebration of the Third Reich.

And
it was Hitler's Nazi propaganda machine that popularized the five
interlocking rings as the symbol of the games.

A
study released today shows most Americans would not cooperate with
government's attempts to protect them in the aftermath of a domestic
terror attack.

...

"The public's concern about the smallpox vaccine is well-founded," said
study co-investigator Alonzo Plough, Ph.D., director of public health in
Seattle and King County, Wash. "Concerns about the vaccine's side effects
were a major reason that so few health-care workers agreed to be
vaccinated in CDC's recent Smallpox Vaccination Program."

If
Thursday's large explosion over North Korea proves to be a nuclear test,
then this could turn out to be one of the most important events of the
decade. If the bizarre "Dear Leader" Kim Jung Il, who has a history of
kidnapping Japanese women, possesses "the bomb," it would serve to
seriously destabilize an already shaky region of the world.

The blast could possibly be a massive, military related
accident, but, judging from the size of the mushroom cloud, the detonation
would have to either be nuclear or involve a staggering amount of
conventional explosives.

"We
understand that a mushroom-shaped cloud about 3.5- to 4-kilometer (2.2 miles
to 2.5 miles) in diameter was monitored during the explosion," the source in
Seoul told Yonhap. Yonhap described the source as "reliable."

There is
no doubt, however, that our political leaders knew almost immediately
whether or not the event was a nuclear explosion, since there are a variety
of atomic blast signatures, ranging from seismic to gamma ray bursts to
fallout, that are very easy to detect. Whether nuclear or not, it is
highly disconcerting that our public servants decided to hide such important
information from their bosses, the American people.

Strangely, this belated
New York Times story published just moments ago seems to postdate
the AP story link in our headline. Have the New York Times
White House sources grown that stale, or is this story an attempt to set the
stage for a disclosure that will likely occur later today?

President Bush and his top advisers have received intelligence reports in
recent days describing a confusing series of actions by North Korea that
some experts believe could indicate the country is preparing to conduct its
first test explosion of a nuclear weapon, according to senior officials with
access to the intelligence.

If the
North Korean blast was of nuclear origin, let us hope that the news will not
be played up for political gain or used as an excuse for launching even more
assaults on our Bill of Rights. And let's pray that this does not set
the stage for nuclear terrorism.

UPDATE: A U.S. official now
claims that the explosion was not the result of a nuclear detonation.

We've
updated BandwidthBurn so that the memory bandwidth curves are now much
smoother even though it is now plotting bandwidth results in real-time.
Also the program can now graph dataset ranges up to 16MB. For mobile
processors that like to idle down to low clock frequencies, there is now a
"spin-up CPU" option to ensure that the CPU is running at the highest clock
rate before bandwidth measurements begin.

One of
the few true champions of liberty in Washington D.C., U.S. Representative
Ron Paul has published a dire warning to Americans that a National I.D. card
with biometric identifiers is both a real, near term possibility and a
sinister threat to our freedoms.

A
national identification card, in whatever form it may take, will allow the
federal government to inappropriately monitor the movements and
transactions of every American. History shows that governments inevitably
use the power to monitor the actions of people in harmful ways. Claims
that the government will protect the privacy of Americans when
implementing a national identification card ring hollow. We would do well
to remember what happened with the Social Security number. It was
introduced with solemn restrictions on how it could be used, but it has
become a de facto national identifier.

Those who are willing to allow the government to establish a Soviet-style
internal passport system because they think it will make us safer are
terribly mistaken. Subjecting every citizen to surveillance and "screening
points" will actually make us less safe, not in the least because it will
divert resources away from tracking and apprehending terrorists and deploy
them against innocent Americans!

Dr.
Paul, a strict Constitutionalist from Texas, also blasts the 9/11 Commission
as a sham.

As I
have written recently, the 9/11 Commission is nothing more than
ex-government officials and lobbyists advising current government officials
that we need more government for America to be safe. Yet it was that same
government that failed so miserably on September 11, 2001.

Taiwanese chipmaker VIA Technologies released today a "Padlock" developers
kit to allow coders to more easily exploit the powerful encryption and
random number generation features of the company's current "Nehemiah" C3 x86
microprocessors. VIA has made available both Windows and Linux
versions of the Padlock SDK.

Former
U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright
told
a stunned Fox News Channel analyst last December that she suspected
President Bush would stage the capture of al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden
immediately prior to the upcoming presidential election in order to secure
the White House for a second term. According to "Roll Call" reporter
Morton Kondracke, Albright believes that the Bush administration may already
have secured bin Laden, but will sit on the news in order to orchestrate an
"October surprise."

Soon
after this news surfaced, radio talk show celebrity Alex Jones
claimed that
a source close to the Bush family disclosed that bin Laden, for whom the CIA
is known to have served as a benefactor, is dead. Under agreement with
the powerful bin Laden Saudi oil family, Osama's frozen corpse would be
thawed to serve in a fake capture event planned by the Bush Administration
to occur this October before the elections.

As
absurd as these "conspiracy theories" might seem, Joseph Cofer Black, the
U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, escalated rhetoric
last Saturday, prompting claims that the U.S. is now "near
seizing bin Laden."

With October only a few short weeks away, we should keep an
eye open for signs of a "bin Laden on ice" conspiracy unfolding.

Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for
us: for it is written, "Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree."

During
the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO)
meetings in Seattle,
a small handful of "anarchists," clad in black and wearing masks, vandalized
businesses and spread chaos in downtown Seattle while garnering worldwide
press coverage. These destructive actions of a few dozen professional
rabble-rousers were able to discredit the peaceful yet massive protests of
many thousands of people from all walks of life who are opposed to the
actions of the WTO.

Well it
appears that some of the same instigators are expected to be back in force
at the Republican National Convention in New York City. If you are
part of a large peaceful protest group, you should strongly consider
assigning members of your group to follow and continuously videotape any of
these black draped, professional troublemakers that appear in your midst.

War
should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a
breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as
ability to execute, military plans.

VIA has
enhanced the very popular Open Source Xine Player to take advantage of VIA's
hardware media acceleration technology. You can visit the SourceForge
project page by clicking on the link above.

No
enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy
[the people] until it is ripe for execution.

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

August 11th, 2004

Christianity is not about compromise. God's Truth does not change with
the latest poll results or with the most recent fads in psychology.
And don't be fooled that the "War on Terror" has Jesus now believing in
torture.

Under
the quickly thinning ruse of "The War on Terror," a U.S. government
commission decided to extend wiretapping regulations to the Internet.
The Federal Communications Commission voted 5 to 0 last week to require
snooping backdoors on all Internet-based phone services. However, the
FCC stopped short of a complete hijack of Internet communications and
declined the FBI's request to also legally demand backdoors on all instant
messaging (IM) and voice over IP (VoIP) applications that do not use the
established phone system. Of course, making such mandates on IM and
VoIP would have been grievously unpopular and very difficult to enforce.

Email,
the most popular method of Internet communications, is now probably the
least secure. Under the so-called "Patriot Act," the U.S. government
can now, without obtaining a warrant and without a probable cause for
suspicion, read through all of your email without ever telling you they did
so or why. More recently, even private businesses have been given this
same egregious level of email spying authority.

We first
reported about the FBI's Internet snooping gambit in a
May article.

August 6th, 2004

Strange Defense of LGA

One of
my favorite tech writers has just completed a strange, apologetic defense of
LGA and it has me befuddled.

In the
process, the author, who should know better, set up and knocked down a
series of straw-man arguments that had no bearing on the pins versus pads
debate. Among them are:

improved motherboard trace routing: Intel would have made the same or
very similar routing decisions regardless of PGA versus LGA.

the
physical layout surrounding the LGA socket has improved: the keep-out
zone and the z-height requirements have nothing to do with Intel's decision
to drop pins.

the
heat sink is no longer holding the CPU in the socket with LGA requiring much
less retention force: the idea that the heat sink is used to hold the
CPU in a closed PGA socket is a strange one considering that the frictional
force of a closed ZIF socket is usually pretty significant. The main
reason for the prodigious clamping forces on P4 heat sinks is to improve
thermal conductivity across the contact interface. The chip might give
way a little under current PGA sockets, but an LGA775 retention mechanism
could have been developed for PGA if this was a real issue.

increasing pin counts demand a shift to LGA: while LGA allows for
somewhat greater contact density, the Opteron, which has many more contacts
than LGA775, has no problem accommodating its hundreds of additional pins.

The
big issue that has motherboard makers up in arms is that the fragile
physical interface between chip and system has shifted from the CPU to the
mainboard. If you bend a pin on a CPU, you can usually straighten it out.
If you accidentally snag an LGA socket finger, or fumble the CPU into the
socket cockeyed, good luck. Often you are going to have to trashcan the
motherboard. And the motherboard vendors, who operate on the slimmest of
margins, are going to have to swallow these additional returns.

And if
Intel really believes in the contact density mantra, why didn't it design
the fragile contact fingers to sprout from the bottoms of its
microprocessors while placing the robust pads on the motherboards?

Make no
mistake, Intel benefits tremendously with a successful shift to LGA.
As we discussed back on June 6th, LGA processor packages save Intel several
dollars per CPU. Multiply this number alone by the millions upon
millions of units that Intel ships and this turns out to be a big chunk of
change. And this doesn't include the fact that all pin related
returns will be eliminated for Intel with the adoption of LGA.

In the
grand scheme of things, is LGA good or bad overall?

From a
processor vendor's point of view, LGA looks really, really great. You
can bet that there are people inside of AMD and VIA et al who would
very much like to see Intel's LGA initiative take hold since it would help
facilitate an industry-wide shift to pinless CPUs.

Motherboard makers, on the other hand, will have to adjust to a more
expensive socket, while absorbing an entirely new and substantial vector for
motherboard returns. Returns serve motherboard vendors significant
harm because profit margins are already so very narrow for them.

Ironically, in the not too distant future, microprocessors will likely be
made completely electrically isolated and will communicate with the rest of
the computer through optical interfaces. In the interim, PGA-based CPU
packages have enough "legs" to bridge this gap. LGA will almost
certainly not be necessary, but LGA may win out simply given Intel's
market strengths.

So is
LGA a "conspiracy?" Intel is a business and as such its design
decisions certainly consider profit impacts. There is no doubt that
the company was well aware that it was shifting costs and risk vulnerability
away from itself and onto motherboard vendors with its LGA scheme. The
giant chipmaker would have to be unbelievably inept if it had not considered
this impact on the motherboard-CPU ecosystem. The benefits of LGA are
almost entirely on the CPU side while the drawbacks fall almost totally onto
motherboard vendors. If the consumer's best interests have been served
is yet to be determined.

Click on
the link above to download the new version of COSBI OpenSourceMark (~8.6MB).
In addition to a number of bug fixes, we have added a lot of new features,
some of which are:

Two new
OpenGL tests: Lorenz Attractor plots the famous chaotic curve and
traces it with a lighted sphere. N-Body OpenGL is a precise 3d
version of the 2d N-Body test.

Spin
up option is useful for testing mobile CPUs that leverage dynamic
frequency transition technology. Spin up deploys an
artificial load before each test in order that the CPU will be at its
highest clock speed throughout all tests.

Persistent application settings: OSMark now uses an INI file to retain
the state of the last session.

All
scores have now been normalized against a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 with
HyperThreading and a GeForceFX 5600.

This is
an interim release and we have no comparison scores in the database.
If you find bugs with this build, please let us
know. If you have any suggestions for new tests, please
drop us a
line. If you would like the source code, just
send us an email request.

A
cool article: the Iraqi Christians whose churches were bombed have been
praying for forgiveness of those who did it:
http://tinyurl.com/5xtc2

In a nation of supposed Christians, with Christian leadership and Dubya
invoking God at every point, I have desparately desired to see this response
from U.S. Christians. Instead I heard it from the depths of a Muslim country
which I didn't even realize had Christians.

Imagine what it would have meant to the world if 250 million of us had
forgiven our enemies rather than flailing off almost singlehandedly into a
set of wars that had very little to do with the attacks. And what terrorist
group could long sustain an offensive against a country bent on forgiving
it, a country following its Lord's directives wholeheartedly?

Revelation 3:17 (in the ESV), spoken to the lukewarm Laodicians, says "For
you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that
you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked." Our wealth does not
make our suffering special and does not remove our obligation to forgive. I
am thankful to have seen the wondrous example of the Iraqi Christians.

Kerry
didn't go so far as to say that strong encryption should be outlawed, which
Freeh had wanted. But in 1997, the Massachusetts senator did vote for an
FBI-friendly bill that would have forced the U.S. technology industry to
head in the extremely troublesome direction of key escrow. ("Key escrow"
means backdoors in encryption products for the surveillance convenience of
police and spy agencies.)

Apple's
cofounder Steven Wozniak is cooking up tracking chips for your children
according to the inquirer. It is not clear if Woz's devices are
implantable like Applied Digital's "Mark-of-the-Beast-like"
Verichip.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wozniak's former Apple partner, Steven Jobs, has
undergone surgery to remove an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, a type
of pancreatic cancer. Other forms of pancreatic cancer are incurable
and extremely virulent and have resulted in the deaths of actors Michael
Landon and Rex Harrison and several of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's
family. Some
reports claim that the late singer George Harrison also succumbed to
pancreatic cancer. Incurable adenocarcinoma, the most common form of
pancreatic cancer, has essentially a 100% death rate.

It
appears that Mr. Jobs's surgery was successful and the 49-year-old tech icon
plans to return to the helms of Pixar and Apple in September.

About
two years ago, a sizable chickenpox eruption occurred in Minnesota
schoolchildren. Embarrassingly for the CDC and its giant
pharmaceutical puppet masters, the outbreak was triggered by a six-year old
who had already been vaccinated for the disease. Worse yet, many of
the children who came down with the virus had been similarly immunized.

The link above points to an article discussing a study that
confirms that a substantial number of the Minnesota children who fell ill
during the chickenpox spate had been inoculated for the disease. The
study concludes that the vaccine wears off quickly with time. But
instead of questioning the usefulness for this balky vaccination for an
illness that is usually mild for most children, the article pumps for even
more chickenpox "immunizations" through booster shots.

The obvious problem with this strategy is that it could
result in an adult population that is vulnerable to the sickness.
Chickenpox is a much more severe malady if it is contracted during
adulthood, hitting adults significantly harder than it does infants who
themselves are more vulnerable to complications than older children.

There is also concern that childhood chickenpox jabs could
lead to increased incidence of shingles in adults. In fact, one
British study suggested that the resulting shingles deaths could be as high
as the number of chickenpox deaths prevented by the vaccines. Worse
still, shingles is now being observed in children, appearing in those who
have been inoculated for chickenpox. And the chickenpox vaccine itself
can directly lead to serious side effects including death.

As with all vaccinations, use your own good judgment before
subjecting yourself or your children to unnecessary risks. And above
all, do not take the CDC's or Giant Pharma's words for anything.

As
an officer in command (OIC) in training, Kerry reported during this
mission to William Schachte, who eventually retired as a Rear Admiral.
Schachte flatly contradicts Kerry's claim to have been wounded by enemy
fire, saying that after his M-16 jammed, Kerry picked up an M-79 grenade
launcher and fired a grenade that exploded too close to the boat, causing
a small piece of shrapnel to stick in the skin of his arm. Kerry himself
did not report receiving hostile fire that night, which would have been
required, and there is no record of hostile fire for the mission.

Kerry succeeded in keeping the small piece of shrapnel in his arm until
the following day, when he was treated by Dr. Louis Letson, whose version
of the event matches William Schachte's account rather than Kerry's:

I have a very clear memory of an incident which occurred while I was
the Medical Officer at Naval Support Facility, Cam Ranh Bay. John Kerry
was a (jg), the OinC or skipper of a Swift boat, newly arrived in Vietnam.
On the night of December 2, he was on patrol north of Cam Ranh, up near
Nha Trang area. The next day he came to sick bay, the medical facility,
for treatment of a wound that had occurred that night.

The story he told was different from what his crewmen had to say about
that night. According to Kerry, they had been engaged in a fire fight,
receiving small arms fire from on shore. He said that his injury resulted
from this enemy action.

Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore,
but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on
shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment
ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.

That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.

What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the
skin of Kerry's arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and
was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round
from a rifle.

I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with
forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not
require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it,
and did not require any sutures to close the wound.

The wound was covered with a bandaid.

Not [sic] other injuries were reported and I do not recall that there was
any reported damage to the boat.

The following morning, John Kerry arrived at the office of Coastal
Division 14 Commander Grant Hibbard to apply for a Purple Heart. Having
already been informed by Schachte that Kerry's injury was self-inflicted
rather than the result of hostile fire, Commander Hibbard told him to
"forget it." Hibbard recently said of Kerry's minor scratch, "I’ve seen
worse injuries from a rose thorn."

In the
middle of the "War on Terror," our borders are left wide open while Bush
entices hoards of illegal aliens to pour into our country by promising
Social Security benefits when our Social Security system is very near to
implosion. And at the same time Bush sends our troops,
who should be guarding our borders, into Iraq where he creates a veritable
"terrorist" incubator. Bush then has our trusting, patriotic troops
beat this hornet's nest with a very short stick by imposing marital law resulting in our soldiers
and the American people getting stung.

Wakeup! The "War of Terror" is really a "War on Your
Freedoms" using the fear and uncertainty of terrorism to make you comply!

For more than thirty years, most Vietnam veterans kept
silent as we were maligned as misfits, addicts, and baby killers. Now that a
key creator of that poisonous image is seeking the Presidency we have
resolved to end our silence.

The time has come to set the record straight.

...

John Kerry's service in Vietnam lasted 4 months and 12
days, beginning in November 1968 when he reported to Cam Rahn Bay for a
month of training. His abbreviated combat tour ended shortly after he
requested a transfer out of Vietnam on March 17, 1969, citing Navy
instruction 1300.39 permitting personnel with three Purple Hearts to request
reassignment. So far as we are able to determine, Kerry was the only Swift
sailor ever to leave Vietnam without completing the standard one-year tour
of duty, other than those who were seriously wounded or killed.

It is clear that at least one of Kerry's Purple Heart awards was the result
of his own negligence, not enemy fire, and that Kerry went to unusual
lengths to obtain the award after being turned down by his own commanding
officer.

John Kerry has long insisted that using the three-injury loophole to leave
combat early was his own idea, but Kerry's fellow Swift officer Thomas
Wright, who served on occasion as the OIC (Officer in Charge) of Kerry's
boat group, contradicts that claim. Wright reports that he "had a lot of
trouble getting Kerry to follow orders," and that those who worked with
Kerry found him "oriented towards his personal, rather than unit goals and
objectives." He therefore requested that Kerry be removed from his boat
group. After John Kerry qualified for his third Purple Heart, Thomas Wright
and two fellow officers informed him of the obscure regulation, and told him
to go home. Wright concluded, "We knew how the system worked and we didn’t
want him in Coastal Division 11."

Constructing a complete picture of Kerry's service is difficult due to gaps
in the Naval records provided by the Kerry campaign. These gaps include
missing and incomplete fitness reports, missing medical records and missing
records related to his medal awards.

For this reason we call upon Senator Kerry to authorize complete access to
all his military records by filing a standard Form 180, a simple two-page
release form.

O'Neill's book says Kerry "would revisit ambush locations
for re-enacting combat scenes where he would portray the hero, catching it
all on film. Kerry would take movies of himself walking around in combat
gear, sometimes dressed as an infantryman walking resolutely through the
terrain. He even filmed mock interviews of himself narrating his exploits. A
joke circulated among Swiftees was that Kerry left Vietnam early not because
he received three Purple Hearts, but because he had recorded enough film of
himself to take home for his planned political campaigns."

In
general, television is like a giant hypodermic needle injecting septic tank
sludge directly into our brains.

However, there is an exception. In a handful of
communities, cable access channels have blossomed like the Internet into
bastions of free speech. One of the most glorious examples of this
phenomena has occurred in Austin, Texas where not only is there a wonderful
mix of award winning eclectic programs, but many of these access TV programs are more
intelligent and entertaining than anything found in the corporate cesspool.

Also, a great number of these locally produced shows have unplugged from the
Matrix and take on the globalists -- Republican and Democrat Illuminati
alike -- head-on. And the Austin access channels often have ratings
that pummel corporate programming.

Despite the demonstrably wild success of Access TV in the
area, Austin Community Access Television plans to effectively kill the
31-year-old institution. If you live in Austin, you can speak out
today against this blatant affront to free speech by following the link
above.

The
Skull and Bones "Long
Devil" blueblood and the Democratic National Convention give us a glimpse of
what the U.S. would be like under Kerry's reign. And it would be more
of the same butchering of the Bill of Rights that has progressed under Bush
and Clinton...

Former
American President Bill Clinton, whose popularity remains high in certain
circles, has cheerfully agreed to take a prominent role in fellow Democrat
John Kerry's Presidential bid. One of William Jefferson Clinton's most
lasting legacies is the brutal
massacre of the 74 men, women and children from a small, eccentric,
separatist, religious group in Waco, Texas.

Civility is a one-way street for the aristocrats.
Captured below in a Hitler-esque pose, the fabulously wealthy blueblood
angrily tracked down a reporter and told him to "shove it!" just minutes
after she completed a speech about civility and dignity.

If you
want to exercise your God-given, inalienable rights to free speech at the
upcoming Democratic National Convention, you'll find yourself herded into
the caged "Free Speech Zone," double speak that would make Orwell proud.

People, WAKEUP! The highest levels of the Democratic
and Republican parties are working for exactly the same goal: the
dissolution of the American Bill of Rights and the establishment of an
oppressive, brutal, Godless, fascist world government with a handful of
inbreed aristocrats and financiers at the top.

In an
example of how the common man or woman can still make differences in our
country today despite the rapid consolidation of power into the soiled hands
of aristocracy, National Archive workers set a "sting" operation into effect
after suspicions arose that Clinton high priest and former Kerry lieutenant
Sandy Berger was stealing highly sensitive documents from under their watch.

Last Oct. 2, former Clinton national security adviser
Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger stayed huddled over papers at the National Archives
until 8 p.m.

What he did not know as he labored through that long Thursday was that the
same Archives employees who were solicitously retrieving documents for him
were also watching their important visitor with a suspicious eye.

After Berger's previous visit, in September, Archives officials believed
documents were missing. This time, they specially coded the papers to more
easily tell whether some disappeared, said government officials and legal
sources familiar with the case.

The notion of one of Washington's most respected foreign policy figures
being subjected to treatment that had at least a faint odor of a sting
operation is a strange one. But the peculiarities -- and conflicting
versions of events and possible motives -- were just then beginning in a
case that this week bucked Berger out of an esteemed position as a leader of
the Democratic government-in-waiting that had assembled around presidential
nominee John F. Kerry.

The 9/11
commission report to be released today recommends handing control to both
spending and policy for much of the "War on Terror" to permanent joint
Congressional intelligence and domestic security committees. The new
joint committees would absorb, restructure and eliminate existing organs
while wielding tremendous centralized power.

The sham commission also
recommends the creation of a Cabinet-level national director of
intelligence who would be given authority over the CIA (America's foreign
intelligence), FBI (America's domestic intelligence) and other agencies.

Together, these moves would significantly distill control of
our emerging police state apparatus into fewer and fewer hands.

Jonathan
Idema, an American citizen "terrorist hunter" operating at large in
Afghanistan, claimed in an Afghan court that his personal "war on terror,"
which involved capturing and torturing Afghans, was exercised under the
auspices of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Ian
Spiers had just hours to finish an assignment for his photography class. He
was taking shots of a railroad bridge near the Ballard Locks when an officer
with a German shepherd approached him, asked him what he was doing and
requested some ID.

Later, he was questioned and photographed by a Homeland Security agent.

It was the second time in less than two months that Spiers had been
questioned about taking pictures of a landmark that attracts hundreds of
tourists a day, many of whom snap photos of the ships passing between Lake
Union and Elliott Bay.

A growing number of photographers around the country have been similarly
rousted in recent years as they've tried to take pictures of federal
buildings and other major public works, said Donald Winslow, editor of the
National Press Photographers Association's magazine.

"We've seen the constant erosion of our civil liberties amid this cry for
homeland security by doing things that have an appearance of making us safe,
but in reality it's a sham," Winslow said. "No one showed up at the World
Trade Center and took photographs from nine different angles before they
flew planes into it."

A reader
sends us this link to a story about an unusual animal seen and filmed in
Glyndon, Maryland. The superficially hyena-like or perhaps thylacine-like
creature is not shy and has been seen by many people in broad daylight and
at short distances.

This
strange looking animal vaguely recalls an old pet of ours. Disgusted
with the high costs of professional grooming, years ago I shaved the family
schnauzer, Pogo, so that he had a bushy mane and a narrow, spiky ridge of
hair down his back. It was fun to take Pogo out to the yuppie-filled
jogging trails and watch the runners gasp and jump out of our way at the
sight of our leashed, grunting, warthog-like companion.

Former
Clinton advisor Sandy Berger allegedly smuggled out highly sensitive
terrorist reports and related notes from the National Archives. Some
of this material, transported out in Berger's pants, socks and jacket, has
since disappeared. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill)
comments:

What could those documents have said that drove Mr. Berger to remove them
without authorization from a secure reading room for classified documents?

What information could be so embarrassing that a man with decades of
experience in handling classified documents would risk being caught
pilfering our nation's most sensitive secrets?

Did these documents detail simple negligence or did they contain something
more sinister? Was this a bungled attempt to rewrite history and keep
critical information from the 9/11 Commission and potentially put their
report under a cloud?

July 19th, 2004

Microsoft and Lindows Settle Trademark Case

We just
received this Linspire press release:

REDMOND, Wash., and SAN DIEGO — July 19, 2004 — Lindows.com and Microsoft
Corp. today jointly announced that a worldwide settlement has been reached
in the trademark infringement cases between the two companies.

"This case was centered on the fundamentals of international trademark law
and our necessary efforts to protect the Windows® trademark against
infringement," said Tom Burt, corporate vice president and deputy general
counsel for Microsoft. "This settlement addresses those concerns, and we are
pleased that Lindows will now compete in the marketplace with a name
distinctly its own."

"We are pleased to resolve this litigation on terms that make business sense
for all parties,” said Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows, Inc. “Over the
next few months Lindows will cease using the term Lindows and transition to
Linspire globally as our company name and primary identifier for our
operating system product."

The settlement agreement resolves all claims in this litigation, both in the
United States and internationally. Terms of the settlement are confidential.

The "Lindows" moniker will be dropped from all Linspire
products by September 14th and all Lindows related URLs will be transferred
to Microsoft in exchange for a cash settlement of
$20,000,000.

Chess
icon Bobby Fisher faces deportation from Japan to the U.S. after Fisher's
passport was
suddenly revoked. Back in America, Fisher will face charges for
playing a chess match in the former
Republic of
Yugoslavia under alleged violation of U.N. sanctions. Fisher
could spend up to ten years in prison and suffer a fine ranging into the
millions of dollars. Yes,
fascism, both in U.S. and U.N. guises, knows no limits to absurdity.

To be sure, Fisher can be a fountain of
caustic diatribe, but how does anyone warrant a blatantly and offensively
manipulative
piece in the pretentious Atlantic Monthly? The wildly
vitriolic article boxes in the reader so oppressively that there is no
space to form an independent opinion. Maybe Fisher really is crazy,
vain and hateful, but we should trust corporate media least when it
demands that we abandon our own powers of appraisal. And we should
question their motives just as we should scrutinize the sudden extradition
of Fisher.

One
official said the new submarine was a "technical surprise" to U.S.
intelligence, which was unaware that Beijing was building a new
non-nuclear powered attack submarine. U.S. intelligence agencies have few
details about the new submarine but believe it is diesel-powered rather
than nuclear-powered, said officials who spoke on the condition of
anonymity.

The new boat, which appears to be a combination of indigenous Chinese
hardware and Russian weapons, suggests that China is building up its
submarine forces in preparation for a conflict over Taiwan, defense
analysts say.

The
enormity of sub-Saharan African pandemics is staggering. Be forewarned
that this information comes from the U.N.

July 15th, 2004

Checkpoints Set Up Throughout Southwest

We have
been informed that checkpoints have been set up in every state from Texas to
California on Interstate 10 and that all vehicles are being pulled over for
both eastbound and westbound traffic. Drivers are minimally asked
about their travel plans, but many are searched. With a recent
"Supreme Court" ruling, all drivers must answer police questioning and
produce identification or risk imprisonment.

Strangely, this radical escalation of police state behavior
has gone largely unreported in corporate media.

Like
cattle and pets, and echoing the pages of Revelations, certain Mexican law
officials are to receive id/tracking chip implants. Supposedly the
chips cannot be removed, but since each microchip is implanted in the arm
this begs an obvious possibility...

What
could prompt the wealthy, 74-year-old California Education Secretary to tell
an unsuspecting 6-year-old that her name means "stupid, dirty girl"?
You can view the taped episode in both
Windows Media Player and
Real Player.

Could it
be that Richard Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles who keeps company
in the highest political circles, was irked by the child's name "Isis"?
As bizarre as it may sound, the ancient Egyptian goddess is still worshipped
in weird rituals by
FreeMasons and related
organizations like
Skull and Bones
and
others. Of the 800 living "Bonesmen," who are created at a rate of
only 15-per year, two are facing off this year in the
false dichotomy that is our country's Presidential elections.

Here is
the first batch of source code for our COSBI benchmarking tools. We
recommend that you create the directory structure "c:\data\cosbi" and
extract the zipped Delphi code into it. In addition to the FileCopy
benchmark, you will also find common files used throughout COSBI projects.
Included is a complete, fully implemented, object oriented CPUID unit,
structures for extracting WMI information, a comprehensive "StopWatch" class
for timing events and a wide variety of useful routines.

To fully
compile this project you will need to import two type libraries for the
WbemScripting_TLB, and ActiveDs_TLB units: "Active DS Type Library" and
"Microsoft WMI Scripting V1.2 Library".

All of
this code is released under
GPL. If you would like to contribute source code to COSBI, please
send it
here.

Intel
recently migrated its end-of-the-line Pentium 4 Prescotts to a new socket
design marketed as "LGA" or "Land Grid Array." Gone are the familiar
armies of CPU pins which have been sources for large percentages of
processor returns. As an added bonus to Intel, the "penny a pin" rule
of thumb for guesstimating package costs means that the Santa Clara
processor peddler may be shaving up to $7 a chip by going the
smooth-bottomed route.

LGA
comes at a good time for Intel because the chipmaker needed more contacts
for Prescott since the I*R drop on 90nm wires is very steep -- steeper than
expected -- and voltage droop is a big problem. More contacts mean
more power and ground points to help alleviate voltage droop.

LGA
chips are in a BGA style package similar to those seen in embedded
applications. VIA's EPIA motherboards have BGA C3's soldered to them.
Cheap and robust, from a processor maker's point of view BGA-style packaging
is very attractive.

However,
Intel's LGA scheme shifts the exposure of product returns from the CPU
vendor to the motherboard maker. Production costs are also migrated to
motherboard companies because the complicated LGA sockets are not cheap.
In fact, prior to LGA, similar sockets for testing BGA parts cost hundreds
to thousands of dollars a piece.

There is
no question that motherboard companies recognize Intel's motivations for
moving to LGA. For many years we have all heard muffled grumbling that
Intel has bullied component suppliers in line behind various Intel-led
initiatives or that the Santa Clara corporation even pressured critical
infrastructure suppliers to neglect support for processors or related
technologies from competing CPU vendors. But these accusations were
usually made "off the record." However, since LGA clearly marks an
extreme change in the cost structure and risk exposure in the
motherboard-CPU "ecosystem," many motherboard makers are being quite vocal
in their displeasure with Intel's LGA.

Our link
points to an official Intel document that details instructions to
"professional system integrators" on how to properly install 775-land
packages into motherboards. The contact photos make it crystal clear
why motherboard vendors, primarily Taiwanese who already operate on
hair-thin margins, are loudly gnashing their teeth about LGA775.

This is
as pseudo-revelatory as Fahrenheit 9/11. For most of our
readers, the Army's disclosure is exposing what we knew from the beginning.
In fact, the Army's report still withholds the detail that a group of Ahmed
Chalabi's henchmen were trucked in for the staged "freedom celebration."

As an effort to quell Iraqi resistance, the Psychological
Operation measure was a miserable failure. But as "Homeland"
propaganda, knocking over Saddam's American flag draped effigy was a huge
success. All of the major news media trumpeted the statue leveling
event as a landmark in freedom's history.

Yet it was all a lie.

A Democratic-Republic cannot function if its citizenry do not
know the truth. Demand accountability from your elected servants in
Washington, turn off the corporate media disinformation and leverage the
Internet's vast storehouse of information to find the real truth!

The
Sunshine State is at the forefront of transferring prison technology into
the hearts of its public schools. On March 9th, we reported that a
Pinellas County, Florida school district obtained a grant from the
Department of Homeland Security to fund a $2-million thumb scanning project
in order to track all of its children as young as the tender age of 5.

My name is Brian Marr and I work in the Windows Client Product Management
Team - I am the product manager for Windows XP64, which means that I am
responsible for making the decisions that will affect how you get your hands
on the product (along with a few other things).

I've been reading these threads and wanted to clarify some things about
availability. Below is a summary of what we have planned. I hope this will
answer your questions.

BETA PROGRAMSz
Today we have a customer preview program, which it sounds as though most of
you have taken advantage of. I realize that we have a very old build out
there and I'm working with our release management team to get an update out
asap. I think you are going to be impressed by how much work our
development team has put into the OS since Beta 1 and look forward to
hearing your feedback on it.

There is also a technical beta program - my understanding is that we'll open
this back up again after XP SP2 ships. This is a great way to get builds
more often, but there are some requirements around filing bugs etc that
you'll be responsible for.

FINAL RELEASE
Now to the big question - what happens when this product releases? Here is
what we have planned:

1. The OS will be available on some new OEM PCs. No surprise there.
The OEMs are responsible for deciding which systems they want to support it
on.

2. The OS will be part of MSDN

3. The OS will be part of Software Assurance

4. The OS will be sold through System Builders and Distributors. You can
either purchase it pre-installed on a system builder PC or just purchase the
OS with some piece of hardware. As Darrell mentioned on another thread,
this can really be anything (a cable, for example). If your system builder
of choice wants to only sell it with high-end components, I'd suggest
finding a new place to buy your equipment.

5. There will not be a retail fully-packaged product. I've read some
interesting posts here where some of you sound angry because we're not doing
a retail box. This really surprises me - SB/Disti is the easiest and least
expensive way to get your new OS, especially if you build your own PCs.

"EXISTING 64-BIT SYSTEMS..."
Finally - I am working on something that would let you trade your 32-bit XP
Pro license for 64-bit. Nothing final here... no details... but the point
is that we want to take care of the people who go out and buy or build x64
systems before we ship.

At the end of the day my colleagues and I work on this project for a reason
- we (you and I) are the people driving the transition into the next phase
in computing. Our job isn't to squeeze money from your pockets or make this
hard for you - we want to make it *very* easy.

Hopefully consolidating some of this info will help. If you have any other
questions about our plans, feel free to ask. If I can answer them, I will.
Have fun with the OS... I'm looking forward to organizing a friendly game of
64-bit UT04 pre-release with anyone interested sometime soon .

Despite
no apparent evidence of dangerous or illegal materials, the FBI has
impounded an art exhibit and may charge the four responsible artists with
biological terrorism. The federal legal actions appear to be intended
to halt the artists' demonstration of the rapid and unreported proliferation
of genetically modified organisms into our food supply.

The
equipment was to have been used at MASS MoCA to conduct simple experiments
on food products to determine if they contained GMOs, genetically modified
organisms. Critical Art Ensemble has staged such performative-art
installations in this country and Europe to call attention to the
proliferation of food-related biotechnology.

According to news reports, the FBI also seized samples of three relatively
benign bacteria used to demonstrate the presence of manipulated genes in
common food items. Erie County health officials later reported they had
tested Kurtz's possessions and found nothing to endanger the public.

The
FBI referred the case to U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul Jr., chief of the
anti-terrorism unit in western New York. Hochul would not comment on the
Kurtz investigation, and no charges have been filed to date.

But
reports from individuals interviewed by federal authorities, including
other members of CAE served with subpoenas, say the tone of questioning
suggests Hochul is attempting to build a case against Kurtz as a
bio-terrorist. Beatriz de Costa, a member of the CAE collective, told The
New York Times the grand jury is looking into "possession of biological
agents."

Following historical trends of other countries that plunged into fascism,
the U.S. government continues to broaden the application of recent, sweeping
anti-terrorism legislation to encompass activities that clearly fall outside
of the realm of terrorism. Using these laws for censorship further
extends this disturbing and rapidly expanding phenomena that started with
the application of Patriot Act provisions on drug raids.

Food using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) must be
rejected and we cannot rely on corporations or governments to protect us.
Not only are there obvious potential health concerns, but patented,
genetically engineered material has already escaped and contaminated vast
areas of crops. The inevitable consequence of GMO exploitation will be
the displacement of naturally occurring food producing organisms with
patented, self terminating, sterile counterparts. This will wrest
control of our food supply into the hands of a global corporate-government
elite who will own the patents on all livestock and crop producing plants.

LinuxDevices has published a fascinating, in depth
interview
with the founder of Centaur Technology, Glenn Henry. In the article,
Mr. Henry recounts the inspiring story of the genesis of the Austin-based
CPU design firm. This tale has become one of the signature sagas of
the semiconductor industry.

Our
engineers are extremely experienced, and very, very productive. One
engineer here does the work of many, many others in a big company. I won't
go through all the details, because they're not technical, but basically,
we started with the theory, "We're going to do this with 20 or 30
designers." Remember the 82 people I mentioned? Of those, only 35 are
actual designers. The rest are testers, and things like that.

So, we said, we were going to do it, with that many people. As I said
before, we had this idea to constrain the complexity of the hardware. We
hired just the right people, and gave them just the right environment to
work in. We bought the best tools, and developed our own tools when the
best tools weren't available, etc., etc.

So I have a long story there, but the punchline is that we were able to
hire extremely experienced and good people, and keep those people. We just
passed our nine year anniversary, and the key people who started the
company in the first year are almost all still here.

So, this is the secret, actually: all the things I do are underlying
things to allow us to hire the right people and keep them motivated and
happy, and not leaving.

Our general claim is, "This is a company designed by me to be the kind of
place I wanted to work in as an engineer." It doesn't fit everyone, but it
fits certain people, and for those people, it's probably the best
environment in the world.

...

We design products very quickly. That was also
part of my theme: be lower cost than everybody else, and be able to move
faster than everybody else. The things that make you able to do things
with a small group also allow you to do things quickly. Actually, the more
people you have, the slower things go: more communication, more
decision-making, etc.

By the way, I stole this idea from Michael Dell. Quick anecdote: I was an
IBM Fellow, and I managed very large groups -- hundreds of people -- at
IBM. And I went to Dell originally to be their first Vice President of
R&D. This was in 1988. So, I get to Dell, and find that the R&D department
is six or seven guys that work directly for Michael! And Michael says,
"Your job is to compete with Compaq." And I say, "Well, how can you do
that with six or seven guys?" And he says, "That's the secret. We'll
always be lower-cost, and we'll move quicker than they are." And of
course, that's worked out very well at Dell.

We put out a lot of products, in a short period of time, which is actually
a major competitive advantage. To give you one minor example, early this
year, Intel started shipping a new processor called the Prescott. It's a
variation of the Pentium 4. And it had new instructions in it, basically,
that are called SSE3. We got our first part in late January. Those
instructions are already in the next processor, that we've taped out to
IBM.

Here is
the first port of the COSBI OSMark benchmark to Linux. While most
tests work, a few are not yet implemented. Maze Threads test only
partially works, as it will run off the road and into weeds very quickly.
The Rich Edit test has mutated into a simple Memo Test since the Rich Edit
control is only native to Windows. The Result Viewer does not work yet
and will be one of the last things attacked since we will need to write a
chart control from scratch. System info is only partially working
right now.

To run the benchmark, you'll first need to install the Kylix
libraries available
here. If you are using a Debian-based distribution, download each
of the "deb" files and, from a console, run "dpkg -i
kylix_library_filename.deb" for each of the deb files. This should
create a /usr/lib/kylix3 directory filled with 17 files.

Now download and unzip this
file while preserving the
directory structure (usually the default action of an archiving program).
From a command line, navigate to the OSMark directory and execute the "go.sh"
script (e.g. "bash go.sh"). This should launch the OSMark GUI.
Other than the caveats above, the program behaves like the Windows version
which you can read about here.

All scores are still normalized against a 3GHz P4 Dell system
running Windows XP. Although the Linux version differs from its
Windows counterpart in terms of the 2d
library used, you will likely be distressed at how much slower Linux is on
any test that does plotting/drawing operations at all (besides filled
circles which blazes on my system). I suspect that the terrible
graphics performance is due to poor driver implementation, but I've only had
a chance to run OSMark on my Lindows system: an Athlon XP 2000+ with 512MB
of PC2100 and an old GeForce3.

If you'd like to lend a hand and want the Kylix source code
to tweak (or just want to peruse),
drop me
a line.

Email Notice

If you
want to make sure that your emails to us do not get swallowed by our
aggressive spam controls, please begin the subject line of your message with
[vhj] or [cosbi].

A
California judge has ordered the maker of popular pocket multi-tool knives
to pay more than $13-million for misuse of the "Made in USA" label. A
spokesman for the Portland, Oregon-based company said that an appeal is
likely.

Dr.
Dennis Ritchie, one of the fathers of Unix, undermined the credibility of a
forthcoming book that claims, among other things, that Linus Torvalds did
not sire Linux.

The "Alexis de Tocquelville Institution" (ADTI) press release
promoting an upcoming tome by its president, Kenneth Brown, states that
Brown's work is based "on extensive interviews with more than two dozen
leading technologists including Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie, and Andrew
Tanenbaum."

However, the iconic Dr. Ritchie reveals in a
note
to Groklaw that his only real interview with Brown consisted of a single,
very brief email. That exchange, published in full at Groklaw, is
telling both in its brevity and by the obvious ways that Brown
unsuccessfully attempts to simultaneously "butter up" Ritchie while trying
to extract any pent-up venom against Torvalds.

In my
opinion, you wrote Unix (UNICS) from scratch. In my opinion, Linus Torvalds
did NOT write Linux from scratch. What is you opinion? How much did he
write? I talked to a Finnish programmer that insists that Linus had the Unix
code (the Lyon's Book) and Minix code. Without those two, who could not have
even come close to writing Linux. I hate to ask such a bare-knuckle
question, but I really feel that this part of history is very gray.

I have
worked in the analyst/writer/tech world long enough to recognize that
Brown's writing stinks with the "gun-for-hire" bovine fecal odor. What
is funny is that Brown is not very good at it. What is not humorous is
that he is being promoted effectively enough to get his press releases into
corporate media.

With Dr. Ritchie's condemning disclosures, all three of
Brown's marquee sources have publicly refuted characterizations that are
critical to the credibility of the ADTI book. Both Richard Stallman
and Andrew Tanenbaum have already vigorously
disputed Brown's
"findings" based on their interviews.

Now Brown is taking a
cheap shot
at Tanenbaum, one of Brown's key-but-now-indicting sources, by effectively
labeling the Dutch professor and Minux creator as a loony.

In an
interview with Tanenbaum, it became immediately noticeable that the
professor was an animated, but tense individual about the topic of rights
and attribution. He felt that well-known facts about Minix/Linux development
should not have to be questioned. It was clear that he was very conflicted,
and probably sorry that he sent the email in the first place.

In
another piece, Brown attacks
Linux while expressing strongly fascist notions that clearly benefit the
corporate-government entity. Brown, who has labeled Linux as "a
leprosy," attempts to knit the Open Source and communist movements together.

In an
eerie coincidence, the [Marx's Communist] Manifesto and leaders of
the open source community both point to distrust of “bosses” and large
corporations as the biggest threat to shared community ownership of
property. As Linux continues to assert itself within the private sector, we
will soon learn if this cynicism was indeed well-placed.

While
Brown's argument is patently [pun intended] preposterous, it is not one that
we should take lightly. Driven by strongly libertarian ideals and
idealists, the Open Source movement is one that our Founding Fathers would
be proud of. As such, the political motivations for Open Source --
among them: personal responsibility, personal initiative, personal freedom
and personal liberty -- are as far away from communism -- which espouses
complete state control over almost all aspects of people's lives -- as
ideologies can get.

However, Brown is fear mongering, and truth, regardless of
how obvious, is usually not a concern when the overall goal is to get people
to react irrationally out of panic. This is especially easy to
accomplish if the topic is remotely foreign to many people like software
development is.

Sickly ironic, Brown's neo-Fascist positions hand off godlike
powers to the corporate-state who can then own things as ethereal as ideas
(like "double-clicking": see below). This places Brown himself
somewhere in the narrow gap between Lenin and Mussolini.

As jackbooted crazy as Brown, whose
portrait looks
remarkably like the Penguin from the campy Batman '60s TV show, may appear,
we should not take him lightly as his ideas are very similar to SCO's and
those expressed by Green Hill's Software (see the May 28th news item).

Clearly there is a concerted and well-funded effort to
undermine Open Source software, but don't think for a second that this is
about money. It's about freedom: stealing your personal freedom to
pimp videos and allow a fascist corporate-state to spy into your private
life. Only tightly controlled closed source software is suitable for
embedding snooping and tracking mechanisms that both corporations and
governments are drooling for.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are living in the Twilight
Zone. Exhibit 458b is Microsoft's successful attempt to obtain a U.S.
patent for the use of different click patterns to trigger various software
functions.

Microsoft has successfully patented using short, long or double clicks to
launch different applications on "limited resource computing devices" -
presumably PDAs and mobile phones. The US patent was granted on 27 April.

Now
any US company using a variety of clicks to launch different software
functions from the same button will have to change their product, pay
licensing fees to Microsoft or give Microsoft access to its intellectual
property in return.

Software patents are not just evil, but, as the Redmond bit peddler
demonstrates, they are absurd.

Here is the updated COSBI utility that we used when we
stuck a Transmeta efficeon notebook into our deepfreeze. COSBI CPU
Speed dynamically measures and charts the clock speed of a system's CPU.
The graphs and raw data can be saved to disk. The program also has a
non-graphical logging feature that minimizes CPU overhead.

After a sleepless night, Lester contemplated the
fluoridation dilemma as he soaped himself in the shower. "They say they are
simply adjusting the level of natural fluoride in the water – which is
calcium fluoride – but they are using a pure grade of sodium fluoride and
very pure water for the rat experiments in the laboratory. But they are
adding toxic pollution scrubber liquor to my drinking water!" It
didn’t make sense. He called a man at the dental association and told
him what he had learnt. The man said, coldly: "If you value your licence to
practise, don’t ever mention this subject again!"

Software "bugs" are coding errors that cause programs to fail
or behave in unexpected or undesired ways. Bugs are inevitable in
complex applications and many bugs can go undetected for years and may never
get resolved. The vast majority of bugs are discovered by running
compiled programs and comparing observed behavior with desired behavior.
However, there are many classes of software flaws that can only be found by
stepping through the source code or, more painfully if the source code is
not available, by using debugging tools like SoftICE. Experienced
software developers know that the only applications that can really be
trusted are those that coders can verify themselves by stepping through the
source.

"Open Source" software are a genre of free programs where the
source code can be obtained without cost or obligation. In the last
few years, Open Source development has picked up a lot of steam with Linux
having perhaps gaining the most momentum. The allure of Open Source is
obvious: the programs are free, high quality, customizable, and verifiable.
On top of this, the number of programmers familiar with Open Source
operating systems, applications and programming tools is shooting up like
gasoline prices. And in terms of security, no self respecting coder
would ever favor adopting closed source over a viable Open Source
alternative.

Security vulnerabilities are the result of either bugs or
deliberately inserted malicious code.

While the Open Source threat to Microsoft gets a lot of
press, makers of boutique, closed source, embedded operating systems,
compilers and applications are gravely challenged by the rising Open Source
tidal wave. Instead of paying for closed source tools, applications
and operating systems, embedded hardware makers can now simply hire a
handful of competent programmers to tweak the Linux kernel, build
appropriate device drivers, massage existing Linux applications, and craft a
few specialized programs. Because many embedded applications are
highly specialized requiring significant outlays in custom programming, Open
Source costs can be much lower. But more importantly, the embedded
hardware company's fate and reputation are not in the hands of a third
party.

One of the biggest closed source embedded software providers
is Green Hills Software. Over twenty-years old, Green Hills provides a
variety of operating systems, compilers and programming tools targeting
embedded development. The Santa Barbara, California, privately held
company has found success in such fertile grounds ranging from the defense
industry to consumer electronics icons like Sony.

Instead of taking the high road in its fight to remain closed
source and inherently unverifiable, the CEO of Green Hills has posted on his
company's website a lunatic rant against Linux. Borrowing a page from
SCO's playbook, Green Hills's Dan O'Dowd claims that Linux is an "urgent
threat to national security" and continues:

Many people have called me an alarmist for saying that the
spread of Linux through defense systems is an urgent threat to national
security. They ask: “What is the big problem? Sure there are plenty of
malicious hackers releasing worms and viruses on the Internet bringing down
Linux systems, inserting keystroke loggers on computers to steal passwords
and credit card numbers, and lots of other mischief, but what does that have
to do with national security?”

It's ironic how the most prominent closed source Linux
alternative, Microsoft Windows, can be seamlessly dropped into the paragraph
above while making Mr. O'Dowd's words demonstrably more accurate.

No, Mr. O'Dowd, you are not an alarmist. You are a man
so grafted to a business model that will inevitably fail that you are
willing to spread outrageous, disingenuous, defaming disinformation. In
fact, you stoop to the repugnant low as to attempt to stitch together Linux
and the "9/11 terrorist" threat:

The 9/11 terrorist organizers had creativity, patience,
and a desire to kill as many people as possible. The terrorists’ success and
their continued ability to evade capture provides an example and
encouragement to others. We must not turn our national defense over to Linux
or any other operating system that is vulnerable to easy attack and
subversion at all times. The 9/11 terrorist organizers, and all those whom
they have inspired, are still out there, and they are still creative and
patient. And if we make our national defense easy to attack, they will kill
a lot more people. If Linux is deployed in critical defense systems, the
result will be catastrophic.

It is fatally ironic to your perverse line of reasoning that
the CIA
example that you held up as evidence of how intelligence organizations
could deliberately attack and undermine Linux was, effectively, deployed
through closed source since the CIA's methods were hardwired in embedded
controllers. In fact, the type of proprietary, closed source tools
that your company provides are the perfect vectors through which
intelligence agencies can covertly deploy attacks. In closed source
applications you can hide anything. In Open Source, there is no
place to hide and coders can be tracked down and held responsible if they
deliberately attempt to insert malicious code into official distributions.

Mr. O'Dowd, stick to showcasing the strengths of your
products and stop the SCO-wannabe-foaming-at-the-mouth-madman anti-Linux
tirades.

Oh, and I'm writing this rebuttal as a response to your own
irony-filled challenge:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for
good people to do nothing.

What's that next to the Tony's pizza, frozen vegetables and
Lean Cuisine? Why a wirelessly remote controlled, $1,500 Transmeta
efficeon notebook running benchmarks. And what happened?
Performance improved up to 20%, among other things.

Warning:
Don't try this at home! Frost WILL form on your notebook which
could cause the system to short-circuit and catastrophically fail.

Get a sneak peek at this COSBI
OpenSourceMark beta, the most flexible, useful and verifiable benchmark
available today. OSMark is a comprehensive benchmarking suite
that is easily user extensible and will be ported to Linux. We'll
be releasing the source code as soon as we finish the documentation and
stomp out the remaining bugs. Follow the link above to learn how
to use OSMark and download the beta.

Local 6[66] News
reported that Rogers is licensed to handle the bald eagle but not to
dismember them after they're dead.

April 18th, 2004

Weird News from Pravda

Formerly the notorious propaganda
mouthpiece of the Soviet Union, Pravda still lives on with
ambitions of becoming an influential international Internet news source.

However, the Russian newspaper has
published several very weird and incredible stories, especially in
their so-called "Science" section. This first
piece claims that, eight years ago, American and British scientists
discovered a "time gate" above the South Pole that propels weather
balloon lifted chronometers thirty years into the past. The
article asserts that the United States intends to send agents from the
CIA or FBI into this time vortex to manipulate history. Advances
in Russian time machine development are also discussed:

The program was resumed in 1987 when
the Institute already functioned on the territory of the Soviet Union.
A tragedy occurred on August 30, 1989: an extremely strong explosion
sounded at the Institute's branch office on the Anjou islands. The
explosion destroyed not only the experimental module of 780 tons but
also the archipelago itself that covered the area of 2 square
kilometers. According to one of the versions of the tragedy, the module
with three experimenters collided with a large object, probably an
asteroid, in the parallel world or heading toward the parallel world.
Having lost its propulsion system, the module probably remained in the
parallel world.

The last record made in the framework
of the experiment and kept at the Institute archives says: "We are
dying but keep on conducting the experiment. It is very dark here; we
see all objects become double, our hands and legs are transparent, we
can see veins and bones through the skin. The oxygen supply will be
enough for 43 hours, the life support system is seriously damaged. Our
best regards to the families and friends!" Then the transmission
suddenly stopped.

This Pravda
article contains a purported photograph of a tiny dead space
alien. A group of Japanese has apparently erected a monument in
remembrance of the 10"-high extraterrestrial that had been adopted by a
mentally disturbed Russian woman before both the lady and the space
alien met with tragic deaths. And for more menacing ETs, Pravda
also claims
that the Soviet Army fought UFOs.

And in March, Dell switched from the
latest version of Intel's Pentium 4, a chip dubbed Prescott, to
Northwood, an older version of the Pentium 4 that comes in speeds
similar to those of Prescott, as the main processor offering for Dell's
Dimension XPS and Dimension 8300 desktops.

Supplies of the Prescott chips and also of the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme
Edition chip have not been sufficient to meet Dell's needs, so the
company has shifted away from them, rather than disappoint customers
with lengthier delivery times for new desktops, a company
representative confirmed.

Van puts Transmeta's shiny new flagship
processor under a microscope. What he finds will surprise
you. With very little provocation, the massive efficeon throttles
to beat the band, so when you need that 1GHz that you paid for, the
efficeon clocks down to 933MHz, 800MHz or even lower! Inside the
exhaustive review, you can also download the tool used to discover this
throttling scandal.

About a decade ago, I worked at a large
corporation as a senior programmer. This company was just
beginning to outsource some of its surplus programming needs to
offshore outsourcing consulting firms primarily located in India.
At the time, the economy was robust and no domestic jobs were being
cutback. Despite this, I was distressed by many of the
consequences of outsourcing that I had observed.

I took my concerns to the VP of IT.
The following is a partial enumeration of issues I had noticed from our
foray into outsourcing our programming needs to India:

1. The quality of work that I had observed
from most of the outsourced contractors was inferior to that obtained
from our locally hired workers.

2. Although most of the outsourced
contractors spoke English well, large cultural divides continued to
exist resulting in communication issues that inevitably impacted
timelines. Cultural differences also led to a degraded social
environment inside the IT department, lowering overall worker comfort
and reducing job satisfaction.

3. The average wage paid to an Indian
contracting firm for the services of one contractor was $50/hour and
did not represent a significant savings to the company.

4. Contractor qualifications were often
overstated.

5. It usually took an investment of about
three months of intensive onsite training to impart enough knowledge
about the company's proprietary software system before a worker of any
type could begin to become productive. With an outsourced
consultant, this investment would be wasted since time spent with the
company by a typical contractor was usually limited to one or two years.

6. The company's proprietary software
technology was at risk of being compromised by the revolving door of
outsourced consultants.

7. It was morally wrong to ship money out
of the local economy, away from the families and friends of our local
communities, especially when local alternatives existed. What
made the current outsourcing trends especially repugnant is that there
was no clear win for the company, short term or otherwise.

As an alternative, I suggested that we
establish a cooperative education program with the local high schools,
colleges and universities for the some of the following reasons:

1. Wages of $10-$20/hour represented a
significant savings to the company, but would seem generous to young
men and women still in high school or trying to make their way through
college.

2. The work ethic of the local culture in
NW Arkansas was superlative. Cultural expectations would be
familiar and comfortable to the salaried workers.

3. Since coop workers would be harvested
from local homes, they had great incentive for staying in the area,
meaning that the company's training expenses could be amortized over
much longer periods.

4. To work in the company's IT department,
a formal programming degree was really not necessary since the
company's proprietary software base required extensive in-house
training. What was more valuable to the company was proven
problem solving abilities, coding skills, ability to communicate and
work well with others, and work ethic. All of these qualities
could be obtained through coop candidates.

5. Putting the company's money in
elevating the targeted skill levels of people in the local area would
be good PR and would help sustain the local economy.

6. It would encourage youth in the area to
acquire education in software development.

Before I left the company, I was able to
establish a fledgling coop program with a local high school. The
first candidate that came through was a resounding success. He
trained faster, his quality of work was outstanding, he communicated
well, and everyone liked him and felt at ease around him. And he
was cheap! It really looked like the coop program could
eventually eliminate most if not all of the company's outsourcing needs.

Several years after I left the company, I
contacted the VP of IT to find out the status of the coop program that
I had left in its infancy. Sadly, she said that it no longer
existed and she didn't know why, especially considering the early
success it had seen. I suspect that it failed because the program
no longer had a champion, someone to stand up, advocate and push
through an alternative solution when the rest of the industry is
migrating like lemmings in the same wet direction.

Of course, now outsourcing has become a
blight on the software development industry, resulting in lost domestic
jobs and decreasing wage levels. If you work as a programmer and
see the insane trend towards offshore outsourcing threatening jobs in
your area, stand up and advocate sane alternatives like coop programs
with local high schools and colleges. In the long run, the
company will benefit and so will your country.

March 19th, 2004

Mac Smacks P4-Xeon in
Benchmarks

At least according to the April, 2004
edition of Popular Mechanics. On page 39 of the venerable
magazine:

Not Being able to run SPEC tests, we
turned to BLAST and HMMer, which are DNA and genome-sequence matching
tests, as well as Bibble, a batch image-processing application...
And we were surprised [by our Linux results]. The G5 was 59.5
percent faster than the HP at processing 85 high-resolution color
photographs totaling 684.6MB of data. In the HMMer tests (61.3MB
of data), Apple was 67 percent faster than the PC and under BLAST
(32.8MB), Apple was 85.9 percent faster. These results are in
line with those now published on Apple's Web site.

The Apple Power Mac system was a dual
2GHz G5 with 2GB RAM and an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro. HP loaned PM
an xw6000 workstation with dual 3.2GHz Xeons, 2GB of RAM and an nVidia
Quadro FX1100. The hard drives were not named in the article
which could be critical giving the large working sets of these
benchmarks.

The Pinellas County, Florida school
district plans to use a federal grant from the Department of Homeland
Security to fund a $2-million thumb-scanning project. From ages 5
and up, all children will have to submit to thumb-scans before being
allowed to board or depart the school district's busses.

A thumb-scan is a process of reading an
individual's thumb print into a computer for identification purposes
and is just one of several "biometric" tracking technologies that have
become vogue since the ghoul of fascism arose from the ashes of the
World Trade Center.

School bus safety has been getting
more attention since a January 2002 bus hijacking in Pennsylvania. A
Berks County school bus carrying 13 students was overtaken by a man
with a rifle, and found in Maryland six hours later when the hijacker
turned himself into police.

Hmm, so I supposed that if
thumb-scanning had been implemented in the Berks County case, then the
school bus driver would have been alerted that the rifle toting man was
not, in fact, seven-year-old Alice Jones or 12-year-old Frankie
Olsen? Dear Lord, are we expected to surrender our children to
such malicious stupidity?

In the last few years, it seems as if we
are rapidly transforming our nation's public schools into penal
colonies that rob our children of dignity, free speech (and other
Constitutional rights), innocence, and, sadly enough, education.

$2,000,000 is a lot of money and it
sounds like Pinellas County schools could put it to much better use by
hiring a few decent American History teachers. Or they could
purchase about 4,000 new computers.

"The power output of the engine can be
restricted according to the license grade, and drivers whose licenses
have been suspended would be unable to operate the car at all."

Time to get a Chevy? At least GM
took the FBI to court to protest using OnStar to
eavesdrop on your conversations. While GM won this case, the
9th Circuit Court of Appeal's ruling leaves open the clear possibility
that similar technology will be used in the future for such
reasons. And under the Patriot Acts, surveillance orders are
getting much easier to come by.

Meanwhile, Ford's Volvo has created a
concept car that has no hood and would actively and autonomously
communicate with the company.

The car's bonnet is another fun
feature.

The whole front of the car is moulded in one piece which can be removed
only by a Volvo mechanic.

"Honestly, the only time I open the bonnet on my car is when I want to
fill up washer fluid," said Tatiana Butovitsch Temm.

"Do we need to have a one metre square hatch for that or could we do it
in another way?

"So we shifted the filling station for washer fluid to the side of the
car, next to where you fill up fuel, and we closed the bonnet for
good."

The car should be programmed to discover any problems under the bonnet,
then send a message to the garage to let them know.

The mechanics would then contact the women directly to invite them
over.

"If the car says nothing, then everything is fine," said Ms Temm
optimistically.

And if you think this automotive news is
alarming, similar things are rapidly brewing in the computer
industry... but one company is fighting the trends toward pervasive
surveillance and governmental control...

February 29th, 2004

The
Passion of the Christ

Jesus was the Son of God, but he was
also a man. As a man, he felt happiness and pain, love and fear in the
same manner that you and I do.

With the foreknowledge that came with his divinity, the dread and
terror he experienced immediately prior to his betrayal was, no doubt,
magnified. Like all of us when faced with a situation involving pain
and death, Jesus was tempted by Satan to shrink away, cower from his
fears in order to pursue his own safety.

Unlike most of us, Jesus didn't run, but confronted his dread and stood
firm for his cause: the Truth of the Father.

Though he did not have to do so, Jesus endured monumental agony as a
man and his example through bearing such terrible suffering is his
greatest gift to us. Jesus is more than his teachings; Jesus is a
paradigm of courage, selflessness, love, compassion and unwavering
faith.

Living in corrupt, decadent times that are in many ways similar to our
own, Jesus' example is one we need to fully comprehend so that we too
can stand unyieldingly for the Truth that is the Father against a
global anti-spiritual movement designed to separate us from God in
order to reduce us to cattle.

The Passion of The Christ is a brave and sincere attempt to
communicate Christ's most important message. Jesus died for our
salvation, but, in doing so, he conquered his fears as a man in a
display of his devotion to the Truth and as testimony to his love for
us all.

Jesus Christ was Son of God, man, hero and example for mankind.

Just Say "No" To
E-Voting Terminals

The rapid adoption of electronic touch
screen voting machines sends chills down the spines of nearly every
computing expert you will find (including this one). The current
systems are vulnerable to voting fraud on levels never before seen in
this country. Insist on a paper ballots at the polling places you
plan to use. Electronic Voting Machines, or "EVMs," pose an
immediate threat that could potentially destroy our election process.